Reviews of My Year of Rest and Relaxation
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is millennial literary phenom Ottessa Moshfegh's second novel. Paradigm: Penguin Books/Provided
Reading Time: 5 minutes
My Year of… Restlessness and feet?
My Year of Remainder and Relaxation is millennial literary phenom Ottessa Moshfegh's 2nd novel. Her other works expose and gently pull apart the same themes: feelings of deep, seemingly incurable loneliness, commonly from a female person perspective. Her works feature women in incredibly unique situations but somehow manage to brand them accessible and universally applicable. My Twelvemonth of Rest and Relaxation was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, making a sizable splash in the literary world back in 2018. None of this explains the gigantic online obsession that it has amassed in the last six months (we tin can probably thank BookTok for that).
In brusk, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a piece of work of early on 2000s historical fiction that focuses on an unnamed, twenty-something Columbia art history graduate living and working in a prosperous post-y2k New York Urban center. She has it all: a great job at an art gallery, a paid-for apartment, social and cultural majuscule due to her wealth and beauty. Despite all of this, she is depressed. She struggles to cope with the death of her parents, something she hasn't acknowledged (and she'll spend the whole book working through this). Her only escape from the tortuous ease and mundanity are Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS and deep, dreamless sleep. She sleeps on her lunch breaks at the art gallery and gets fired for it. Realizing that her natural circadian rhythm doesn't allow her to sleep enough, she visits a quack doctor to get prescribed various pills that will make her body shut down against its volition. Her increasingly disturbing visits to her psychiatrist with a screw loose result in prescriptions piling onto prescriptions. Not since the md in Requiem for a Dream has at that place been a more incompetent physician. The volume focuses on her increasingly extreme and complicated attempts to spend as much time as possible asleep. She decides on a year of sleep: this is the eponymous year of residuum and relaxation, which she describes every bit "saving her life".
Her social network is barebones, composed of her self-made corporate friend Reva, a clothes size four (half-dozen if she'southward bloated) gym rat envious of our narrator in every way. Her two male companions are her fuck buddies (the precariously masculine Wall Street asshole Trevor) and an ambiguous romantic interest (the modern artist Ping 11). The narrator doesn't intendance about any of these people:, they are simply side characters in her story. The globe revolves around her, and everyone else is nothing but white dissonance at the edges of her narrative.
Even the coldest, nigh cynical person will empathically blench at some of our main character's acidic internal monologues. In a particularly difficult scene, she enters her friend Reva'southward apartment and cruelly tears it apart. Reva struggles with bulimia, a medical condition which our protagonist sees non every bit a serious disorder but a moral shortcoming. This constant criticism of Reva never actually abates: she criticizes her for the way she drinks tequila and diet mount dew, for her wearing apparel sense, for her actual insecurities and eating disorder, for her obsessive exercise. Reva is the only person to come visit the narrator during her depressive slumber episodes, merely the narrator always acts annoyed, brushing her off. This toxic friend dynamic shifts in the third act, but leaves the states wondering if it is too late. Without spoiling the catastrophe, everything is resolved and neatly wrapped up, for better or for worse. The book ends with such genius it's most frustrating. (And for the record, I did cry.)
My Year's unnamed protagonist is unlikable — a motility that I retrieve is deliberate. We sympathize with her: we don't empathise. She has just plenty distasteful traits to brand u.s. love her and detest simultaneously. When her Columbia sorority sisters are cold and unfeeling after her parent's death, nosotros feel bad. In a way, us equally the reader are the sorority sisters: nosotros experience bad, only nosotros also celebrate a bit at her struggle. Finally, she'south being knocked downward a peg. Just nosotros soon feel worse and worse, as our protagonist's volatile family dynamic and history are slowly unveiled throughout the novel via disturbing waking nightmares and breakdowns.
Why has the volume become so pop now? To make a accomplish, it's the combination of escapism into the novel and our societal escapism into annihilation but our current reality. It's every bit if there is a meta escapism: the scores of readers want to escape to the earth that the narrator is trying to escape from. I really can't disagree with them: who wouldn't want to exist a hot blonde trust fund baby working at a trendy art gallery in NYC? Just to think this is to miss the point completely. The book is a cautionary tale of an emotional and temporal dissatisfaction of a materially satisfied life In several instances, the narrator admits to not even liking designer clothes; she just did what was expected of her. In a flashback, one of her university professors makes fun of her Miu Miu boots, and she thinks nothing of information technology. She but continued to purchase designer boots. It isn't until she undergoes her extended drug-induced haze that she begins to question her buying choices. Who was it that said that the unexamined life is not worth living?
All of this complicated vaguely anti-backer messaging resulted in a peak of Twitter popularity this summer. I saw murmurings on literary Twitter in the springtime, some YouTube reviews appearing. By June, it had entered into other Twitterspheres, the diverse esoteric communities I'm a part of absolutely eating it up. These aren't communities known for their literary knowledge, mind you. The book has become a mere symbol of itself, a stake representation twisted past pubescent girls reading it, missing the point, and unabashedly admiring the narrator'due south wealthy WASP groundwork, her Columbia education, her skillful looks, her designer wardrobe. The painting on the cover has become inextricably associated with the book itself. This idealization ignores the deep emptiness the narrator feels, her deep sense of listlessness, her exhaustion with the boring excess of NYC high culture. Of course, in that location is no 'incorrect' way to interpret art, and most of the memes are self-criticizing and referential in a typical 2021 style. This has generated a wave of memes and edits that heart around pretty girls holding books. My Year of Residue and Relaxation has made its fashion in the literature-for-pretty-girls canon alongside the Virgin Suicides, Lolita, and The Secret History.
Memes are most hands spread on Instagram, an entirely visual medium with a user base that's the target audience for the book. The narrator's burnout is something about universal. Don't we all want to disassemble from lodge for a bit? To non worry about money, or a job, or friends and family unit? Aren't we all wearied? The sudden popularity of the volume can be reasonably attributed to the climate of self-care that has emerged alongside the coronavirus pandemic: a year of residual relaxation was kind of what we were promised. When COVID extended across that first calendar month, information technology became articulate we would be spending an indefinite period within our homes. This presently became an unattainable goal. The stress of online school for students, the constant stream of emails and zoom meetings for the employed, the continued work and long hours for the members of the service industry, who never got a pause. On top of all of this is the constant social media pressure to be productive. Your Instagram explore page constantly asks you what you've accomplished during the lockdowns. Did yous write a book? Did you lose weight? Did you establish multiple streams of income? No! I just wanted to relax, goddamnit!
The book is great — I've read both Death in Her Hands and McGlue, and this was by far my favourite Moshfegh work — but the hype around it is inseparable from the content or quality of the volume itself. It's not a new book, so most bookstores I called didn't have it in stock, instead conveying her more contempo book, Expiry in Her Hands. I eventually got it special ordered, the hype overtaking me. I needed to own it. It sits on my shelf at home, proudly declaring me an active participant in social media hype. I recommend yous participate too.
Source: https://thefulcrum.ca/arts/reviews-arts/book-review-my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation/
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