Review: A passion for sleep

When we meet her, My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s unnamed narrator is on autopilot. After the death of both of her parents—her father of cancer, her mother of suicide—she has graduated from Columbia University and, after abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist, settled for an assistant job at an art gallery. She treats this gig with ironic remove, not quite above it but clearly disengaged. It’s just selling “canned counterculture crap” (including a $75,000 bloody rug), but then again, it’s just her day job.

My Year of Rest and Relaxationby Ottessa Moshfegh

Penguin Press, 304p $26

When she isn’t working (or, more accurately, half-working), she seals herself in her apartment for long sessions of watching VHS tapes starring her hero, Whoopi Goldberg. She has few acquaintances, and even fewer friends: Other than her neighbors, she only really has Trevor, her long-term, on-and-off-again fling who treats her with condescension, and Reva, a former college roommate whom she treats with indifference.

But the majority of her time (about fourteen hours every day) goes to sleeping. If the narrator had a passion, this would be it; but it ends up as more of an addiction or a vocation: an activity that doubles as a refuge, a passionless exercise appealing precisely because it gives her permission to be blank. This “black emptiness,” in which she can be “neither scared nor elated,” presents its own kind of high, one she finds, more quietly, when she holds on to the house her parents left her: “I think I was also holding on to the loss,” she tells us, “to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”

Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation moves between episodes smoothly, exploring the narrator’s trauma without sentimentality and her behavior with a light—but not apathetic—touch.

So when she gets the chance at work, she naps. When she gets up or gets home, she downs a veritable alphabet soup of drugs—including but definitely not limited to Nembutal, Lunesta, Benadryl, Ambien, Solfoton and Xanax. With the help of her quack doctor, this self-described “somnophile” ups her usual prescriptions. And once she adds the fictional “Infermiterol”—which can knock her out for days—to the mix, she sets out on the novel’s titular scheme: to sleep through an entire year.

When Ottessa Moshfegh commits to the surrealism of the premise, the results are at once slick, mordant and punchy. The novel moves between episodes smoothly, exploring the narrator’s trauma without sentimentality and her behavior with a light—but not apathetic—touch. Her life is bleak when it’s not preposterous, her constant VHS bingeing punctuated by week-long blackouts. The sleep in which she finds “black emptiness” does not even offer clarity or mystical ecstasy. Stuck in this woman’s head, the novel cannot grant us transcendence or redemption, just a grim and entertaining wit.

The narrator’s voice is a subtle balance of crisp and curmudgeonly, indulging in dark comedy as a distancing, if not even a coping, mechanism. Her parents, she tells us, in a characteristic barb, “were too busy to want to imagine my life in Manhattan. My father was busy dying…and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer.” These jokes come often, but even if we laugh, they are not for us. This is a character who does not need our affection. She does not even try to want it. She simply amuses herself, not performing so much as reacting.

The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is untethered and unapologetic, prone neither to moral self-indictment nor any animating compulsion.

This voice should not be as engaging as it is, but in Moshfegh’s hands, it can sustain the entire novel. At once languid and sharp, the prose here is its own precise alchemical combination. It feels discursive, but it moves quickly. It maintains the emotion stillness of its speaker, but it knows when to disturb. The effect can thus be difficult to describe but easy to praise: it is sleepy in its liveliness, moving in its ambivalence, and funny in its slight melancholy. Like the narrator’s own pharmaceutical tricks, Moshfegh’s style becomes an addictive repellent, a kind of frothy and alluring bile.

This all gives the novel a breeziness, yes, but also a powerful and numbing weightlessness. The narrator is untethered and unapologetic, prone neither to moral self-indictment nor any animating compulsion. She is not so much manic in her self-destruction as avoidant, too bothered to even give us her name. She is, above all, exhausted by responsibility, even the responsibility to feel. To psychologize this with the usual suspects—grief, depression, despair—is to betray the novel’s own terms, for what Moshfegh gives us is, no matter how fascinating or involved, all surface. But as the novel makes clear, that is its own distinct psychology. Some people really may just short-circuit and slouch into the next day. This narrator could be a reliable one, and there really could be no further intensity of feeling here. That may be the novel’s last joke—and its cruelest.