My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Book Rating: 2 / 5
Can I just begin by saying I genuinely thought I was going to enjoy this book? That was before I began reading it, and had based my opinion on the plot of the back of the novel’s description. Let me begin by saying, Ottessa Moshfegh is a very talented writer. Despite my dislike for the substance of this novel, it’s Moshfegh’s writing that pushed me to finish this story. I've never been interested in reading other novels by an author whom I did not like on the first read, but I have been bamboozled by Moshfegh. Because somehow, I can see in this novel that she has immense writing talent, all while it was a slog to get through the actual story told in this novel. Perhaps it’s because I’m too soft, perhaps it’s because I believed I’d have a more Gossip Girl vibe from this novel, maybe I waited for the sky to clear and for the issues to resolve. Yet, none of that happens in this novel. Our main character, an unnamed woman in her twenties, is suffering from severe depression. One she isn’t aware of, and instead has likened her prolonged numbness to deciding that she needs a rebirth. To do this, she turns to sleeping medication. Which she takes by the handful in hopes of skipping entire weekends and then some. She has one “friend” whom she repeatedly says she hates, named Reva. Who is also a vapid, blabbermouth who comes over just to chat and mention how skinny our main character is. My main issue with this novel is that it feels endless, similar to how our main character desires sleep. And not in an oh, this was the author’s idea to make it feel like that way, but in a genuinely difficult read to get through, as you hear about the same four things for almost 300 pages. Her troublesome upbringing, her empty hours watching television, getting two coffees, and sleeping. Don’t get me wrong, our main character has every right to suffer from mental illness, it is human, she is burdened with grief, she is orphaned by parents who never looked twice at her, she has a complicated situationship with “Trevor,” the no-good man who comes over to finish on her chest. This character is of nothing and has nothing. However, she will remind you several times that she is financially well off, skinny, blonde, and pretty, even when she stopped taking care of herself a long time ago. There are also some taboo subjects, or things said by characters that I didn’t feel added to the story beyond the wow-factor of making characters seem vapid and edgy. Perhaps this novel simply wasn’t for me. Maybe I’m being too harsh. As I wrote earlier, Moshfegh is clearly a talented, leviathan-level writer, but I’m of the belief that this novel lacks something. Critics called it a dark comedy, but I suffer trying to find elements of the book I’m meant to snicker at. The ending is unfulfilling as our main character ends up successfully blacking out for four months and entering a sort of peaceful reawakening. Which I feel makes no sense and hastily closes up an otherwise tragic story. So, I just spent hours reading about a thin, pretty, blonde woman who doesn’t have to work, living in an apartment in New York, who is suffering from an undiagnosed depression, who is then rewarded with successfully pulling off her plan of rebirth through taking pills that cause her to black out for days at a time? What, now she gets to walk around Central Park, and smell the roses, and lose her remaining attachments to the world after she emerges from this long-term blackout? I know this book is about mental health, about the trials and tribulations of grief and unrequited childhood love, about the loneliness of even those in society deemed “big-fish” such as rich blonde skinny women, but either these elements did not successfully attach to my heartstrings, or I simply did not truly feel these elements carried through the novel with genuine contemplation. The book starts and ends with our main character getting her way, with her not truly having to process anything; she just sleeps.
