My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh Review

Set in 2000, our nameless narrator decides to check out of her life for a year with the help of a fictional prescription pill. Zipping in and out of consciousness for much of that year, she starts to notice strange side effects - what will she find at the end of her experiment: the miracle transformation of her outlook that she’s seeking or will she perish along the way?

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation is all sizzle and no steak. It’s an intriguing premise but - and perhaps unsurprisingly given that it’s a novel about the main character sleeping the whole time - barely anything happens to make for a compelling read.

I’ll give it this at least: it’s fairly original. And, because of that, it’s unpredictable so I was at least interested to see where it would go. It’s also written very smoothly so it’s accessible and easy to read. The novel reminded me of early Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke - in that the main character is an outsider rejecting society, having a cynical, bleak and detached perspective on life, with an unusual goal. Which appealed to me - early Palahniuk is the best Palahniuk.

Except the protagonists in Palahniuk’s novels usually had a high stakes character arc and much more exciting storylines whereas Moshfegh’s protagonist doesn’t, leading to an often tedious narrative. We learn about her father dying of cancer, her mother killing herself shortly after, her scummy boyfriend Trevor, her vapid, pathetic friend Reva, none of which was all that memorable and only led me to keep wondering: what is this novel trying to say (if anything)?

The protagonist’s life isn’t great - she had a crap job at a Manhattan art gallery - and she has bad taste in men, and losing your parents is a major milestone in anyone’s life. But it’s also not that bad. She’s quite wealthy, she owns a Manhattan apartment and inherited a house upstate, and she’s a beautiful young blonde woman. I just don’t really understand what the problem is. But then she might just be depressed. In which case the story is about a depressed woman who decides to use drugs to sleep for a year in the vague hope of resetting her brain - fine, but, again, what’s the point…? Is Moshfegh’s message simply “life is shit” however privileged you are?

I also don’t know why the novel had to be set in 2000. It seems to have been so that she could end the book on 9/11, which is contrived and manipulative, and underlines the growing feeling I had that this book was nihilistic and faux-edgy for the sake of it.

I liked her eccentric doctor, Tuttle, who somehow managed to get her hands on every prescription drug under the sun effortlessly, and had no problem ladling them out to her patient irresponsibly; she’s a fun character. Maybe that’s a jab at the pharmaceutical industry but Tuttle seems too much of an outlier from the mainstream to successfully and convincingly represent it, so it’s probably not that.

The story was just too slow-moving and dull for me. When she’s not recounting her unremarkable backstory, we’re hearing about her watching Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg movies on a loop while her insecure friend (whom she’s horrible to throughout) prattles on in the background. It’s very uneventful stuff. There was a brief moment when she discovered she was doing stuff in her sleep that she had no memory of (another Fight Club reference) but that doesn’t go anywhere or mean anything either.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is not wholly without merit but it’s also very forgettable, underwhelming and far too boring to recommend. I got the feeling Moshfegh was channelling Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk without the bite of their social satire, so that all we get in this novel is the tone of a gloomy worldview. Maybe teenage me would’ve enjoyed this book more but now me just views this kind of thing as childish and silly. Perhaps appropriately given the subject matter, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a snoozer of a read.