#RichKids of Beverly Hills if one of them tried to seclude themselves from society in an effort to metamorphosize.

Chapter two and onwards are fun; I enjoyed the later third of the book the most as it amped up in a way I did not expect. The book focuses briefly on art as something to be consumed, and the short storyline around it was enjoyable. Pretty crude.

The book is meant to be absurd, so don't think too hard about the logical workings of various things. It's both enjoyable and draining, like potato chips. I would not recommend to those that want to avoid difficult casts, drug abuse, and stories centered around wealth (the story is more propagated from wealth, but the idea still stands). ( )

The narrator, a young woman from a wealthy family, living in New York's Upper East Side, becomes dissatisfied with her post-college life after the death of her father from cancer, then her mother from suicide (triggered by an interaction with medications and alcohol), and embarks on a 'project' to sleep as much as possible over the next year. She contacts probably the worst psychiatrist in history, who actually starts writing prescriptions for sleep aids as soon as the narrator walks in the door. The narrator uses this psychiatrist to get a veritable pharmacy of drugs to help her sleep, and she doesn't even confess to her that she's already sleeping 14 or 15 hours a night, plus an hour at lunch. The book is her story, as the project continues, and how it reaches an end where she becomes involved in a strange art project around her sleeping. By turns very funny and also disturbing, it's a picture of New York city in the year before 9/11, but at the same time feels a bit prophetic about these COVID days. ( )

3,5. ( )

In keeping with its theme, I read the first half of ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’, took a hour's nap on the sofa, then read the other half. It is a novel steeped in the horrors of privileged femininity. The narrator is a tall, thin, blonde, wealthy, and beautiful New Yorker. However she is so depressed, lonely, and unhappy with her life that she decides to hibernate for a year using an alarming variety of pharmaceuticals. These are prescribed by her psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, a hilarious yet terrifying parody of medical incompetence. To give you an idea of the novel’s tone, one of the funniest running jokes is that she keeps forgetting the narrator’s parents are dead:

"You’re exhausted. Plain and simple.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. “According to that book you’re holding, the death gene is passed from mother to child in the birth canal. Something about microdermabrasions and infectious vaginal rash. Does your mother exhibit any signs of hormonal abnormalities?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You might want to ask her. If you are a carrier, I can suggest something for you. A herbal lotion. If you want it. I’d have to order it special from Peru.”
“I was born caesarian, in case that’s a factor.”
“The noble method,” she said. “Ask her anyway. Her answer might shed some light on your mental and biorhythmic incapacities.”
“Well, she’s dead,” I reminded her.
Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and folded her hands into prayer. I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn’t expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched up her face, sneezed violently, turned to wipe her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more.
“And how did she die?” she asked. “Not pineal failure, I suppose.”
“She mixed alcohol with sedatives,” I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle had forgotten that I’d told her my mother had slit her wrists, telling her the truth wouldn’t matter in the long run.
“People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.”

I think that exchange sums up the book quite well, really. Our narrator barely leaves her apartment and is visited by very few people, most often her best friend Reva. Their relationship is the most developed and emotionally significant, as well as painful and depressing, in the book. Neither woman is happy, their dynamic is clearly unhealthy, and both seem aware of this. Yet each provides continuity and support of some kind in the other’s life, which they cannot get from anyone else. Both have appalling on-off boyfriends and distant or dead parents. The most memorable sequence involves a funeral, the only occasion when the narrator leaves New York. The creepiest moments occur when the narrator tries to reconstruct what she did during the gaps in her memory caused by a particular drug.

‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ certainly conveys the intense vacuity of America in the year 2000. Its apparent focus is on how soul-crushing it can be to perform femininity. I can certainly relate to the desire for hibernation, as sleep is so great and waking up invariably disagreeable. However I definitely don’t share the narrator’s cavalier attitude to mixing medications. The consequences of her doing so are more existential than physical, which surprised me a little. Surely by the end of the book she’d have had serious digestive problems and vitamin deficiencies, at the very least. That isn’t really the point, though, as the emotional toll of being awake is under examination. I found much of it darkly funny, with a tightly controlled plot and claustrophobically limited settings. Considering the deep dive into rich people problems, Moshfegh made the narrator’s existential angst impressively compelling. As I’ve come to expect with postmodern novels (or whatever you’d call them - literary fiction written since 2000), there is no real resolution or catharsis at the end. In fact, the ending was more hopeful than anticipated, as the narrator didn’t overdose and die, as I half expected. Instead, she seems much happier, Reva’s death in 9/11 notwithstanding. Thus the apparent message that hibernation works? I’m not sure what to make of that. ( )

I initially really loved this and had given it a 5 star review. Then I read a comment about how this books screams privilege, decided to give it a 4 star. Then realized that’s the point. There’s an obvious “privilege” here and as a black girl who sees privilege and injustice in everything without wanting to, it was so obvious but didn’t effect the way I read this. Regardless, this is good work.

I will never quite agree with people who say this isn’t interesting though. When the plot wasn’t, the language and thought process of the main character was. There was never a seemingly “dull” moment. ( )