‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ is a novel full of fear, anger, angst and pain but is also very funny. The unnamed protagonist is not particularly likeable but I had no trouble relating to her and understanding why the idea of a year of drugged-up hibernation so appealed to her. I loved her caustic wit.
In some ways hers is like a modern day version of Bartleby’s passive-aggressive “I would prefer not to” in Herman Melville’s short story but Ottessa Moshfegh’s story is much more extreme and could only have been written in the 21st century.
Making the protagonist young, pretty, thin and financially secure is a smart touch. It ensures that her opting out cannot he dismissed as her not fitting in. The fact that she ticks all the boxes of what is taken to be ‘successful’ means that we have to look for other explanations to her behaviour.
I think that her choices are rooted in themes of grief and bereavement . The character is scathing about her parents but feels rudderless without them. The death of her friend Reva’s mother (before and after) is a key event. She mocks the pain of others but can’t deal with her own; “I could think of feelings, emotions but I couldn’t bring them up in me “ she muses at one point.
Her own actions stop short of suicide even though the feeling of nothingness would normally make this an option. She certainly doesn’t see her own non-being as being a great loss to the world; this is clear when she reflects “Infinity loomed consistently with or without me.”
Ottessa Moshfegh is not afraid of delving into dark places of the psyche. In a You Tube video recorded at one book readings an elderly reader described a hostile reaction to the choice of her earlier novel ‘Eileen’ at a Book Club. The woman asked Moshfegh if she got this reaction a lot. She replied that some people had a hard time reading about of the more graphic details like puking, deficating or nose-picking and came out with the great line that “disgust is a principal biological function of human beings.”
In ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’, the fact that the protagonist doesn’t kill herself and tries to erase her own identity instead counts as a grudging concession to hope. The statement near the end sums up this young woman’s state of mind (and the novel) pretty comprehensively: “We’re all asleep, brainwashed by a system that doesn’t give a shit.”
