My year of rest and relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Literary fiction

I didn’t know what to make of this book when I’d just finished it. What did it mean?, I texted my friends. What was it trying to say? What was it trying to be? One friend said that she hadn’t looked for meaning it in, really, she’d enjoyed the book as it was; another said she was also puzzled by the reading experience, because it was unclear what the book was saying; another said that she’d particularly appreciated the way escapism is treated as a theme in the book.

My year of rest and relaxation could be read as a critique of escapism as a coping mechanism; perhaps, a commentary on the Western world before and after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York; a lot of irony is also directed to contemporary art, which is one of the major themes.

After a few days’ reflection, I looked at the escapism in the book more closely. One passage sums up the “project” the main character takes up—of sleeping as much as possible for an entire year:

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”

She claims to be doing this to save herself, to improve her life, but in reality she’s clearly heavily depressed and unwilling to truly put in the work to solve her problems; hers is a strategy of complete avoidance. The protagonist has been called unlikeable, and she certainly is; there’s something destructive about her that I think would upset most people, me included. The reading experience felt unpleasant almost to the point of exhaustion, sometimes: I didn’t like the narrator’s outlook on life—I think at some level I was angry with her, so my emotions were definitely engaged—and I didn’t enjoy the atmosphere of the novel at all. It was like a maze I wanted to go through and escape in the shortest amount of time possible, or a room I felt trapped in with the protagonist. Unlike the romance novels I’d been reading, My year of rest and relaxation didn’t provide any sort of light-hearted, enjoyable escapism itself; but when I finally accepted the book as a character study more than a novel, I understood that it did work, in its own way. If I felt trapped in a room with the protagonist, it was because she was also trapped—a trap of her own making, stifling, desolate. The visits to the terrible therapist, the endless pills, the sleepwalking, they all made me feel almost sick to my stomach with unease. These events repeat with minor variations constantly within the space of the narration; as Jonathan Greenberg says,

The year of rest and relaxation thus turns out to be a chronicle of days that barely register. That is to say, in rejecting time, the novel also spurns the very action that the novel would seem to require to sustain itself. This too is, broadly speaking, a modernist ambition.¹

While a theme that underscores the whole novel is a critique of contemporary art, I don’t feel qualified to speak on the subject, as I am no expert—but let’s just say that when my History of Theatre class group organised a day trip to Venice to see a Damien Hirst exhibit, I only went along so I could stroll through the city with a couple of friends, so I agree with the general vibe there. Ping Xi, the artist who uses people and animals in his art for shock value in the novel, is more of a satirical caricature than an actual character, but I’m sure not too far off when it comes to some real artists. Moshfeg said, “I had so much fun writing the satire of early 21st century New York art galleries and coming up with all the crazy art that was in this gallery. […] So for me, it’s a really big deal, but I think for other people, it maybe wasn’t such a major theme for them in their reading”² and I think none of the reviews I’ve read (granted, I haven’t read many, because I don’t like to read them before I write my own) mention this aspect of the novel—it’s one I didn’t really discuss with my friends either, although talking about the book with them greatly helped me in focusing my thoughts.

So what does 9/11 do in relation to the book? It’s a counterweight; it exposes the protagonist’s failings with stark effectiveness. Moshfegh explains it herself in an interview given in 2018:

The book takes place in the year 2000 going into 2001, so the reader feels 9/11 looming. It’s not a 9/11 book, but the year it takes place feels very specific. Why did you make that choice?

I didn’t initially understand that I was writing a book that took place in the year before 9/11. But, it was really through the writing about the New York arts scene through the lens of the protagonist that I understood the New York in the book was the New York at the turn of the millennium. I was like, “OK, she’s sleeping for a year, that means September 11th is coming.” That was when I understood the end of the book. It usually happens to me that I’m writing a novel that I have an end image, or sensation and I know what I’m writing towards and that happened with 9/11 with this book. It was a gift because so much of this book required adopting an attitude of cynicism and juvenile angst. I felt that I needed something really deep and important to ground me in the novel because I knew where I was going. And so it wasn’t by accident that I ended up writing a book that could be put in this category of literature of 9/11.³

I think I needed that few days’ detachment from the sensation of light disgust with the narrator to see the novel more clearly as a whole and understand it. Perhaps I was expecting it to be different when I started it, which impacted my reading experience; perhaps I am not jaded enough to be its intended reader. But after some reflection, I understand that all the things I thought the book was trying to be are there, and in its own way it works; on its own terms it is successful.

1. Jonathan Greenberg; Losing Track of Time. Daedalus 2021; 150 (1): 188–203. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01842

2. Rich Juzwiak, Looking Back With Ottessa Moshfegh at My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Her Year of Pain and Disorientation. 12 December 2018. https://jezebel.com/looking-back-with-ottessa-moshfegh-at-my-year-of-rest-a-1830672036

3. Sarah Hagi, ‘The Body is Smarter Than the Mind’: An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, 28 August 2018. https://hazlitt.net/feature/body-smarter-mind-interview-ottessa-moshfegh