Otessa Moshfegh - My Year Of Rest And Relaxation

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

I thought My Year Of Rest And Relaxation was excellent. I didn’t expect to like it at all and only tried it on the recommendation of a friend, but it turned out to be thoughtful, insightful, very readable and oddly compelling.

The book, set in 2000 and 2001, is narrated by a twenty-something, rich, beautiful New Yorker with no remaining family who can’t engage with anything and decides to try to “reset” her life by being doped-out and preferably asleep for a year, with the help of a wacky, pill-happy psychiatrist. It sounds grim , frankly, but it is so well done that Otessa Moshfegh pulls it off brilliantly and against all my expectations I found it involving, gripping and rather profound. It is very well structured, too, as it heads toward a very striking ending.

It’s a book about what it means to be alive and about the importance of truth and sincerity in a world of self-serving people and the trivialising of deep human experience. Moshfegh sends neat and very well-aimed barbs at the self-obsessed and self-serving of all kinds, and the fatuous superficiality of the world of self-help and pop psychology, for example. It’s all done with a brilliant light touch; never laboured and expressed with a brilliant elegance. The book is packed with unemphasised but profound, insightful phrases like “watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision...”, for example, said of a friend who gads from one diet and life-plan to the next in search of “her goals.” There’s also some unvarnished humour, as when the narrator almost accidentally arrives at the funeral of her Jewish friend’s mother: ‘“Is this the sitting thing? You sit for ten days?” I asked, handing her the bouquet of flowers. “Shiva is seven days. But no. My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot.”’

I would urge you to give this a try even if the description doesn’t sound very appealing. I thought I’d hate it, but it was among the best books I’ve read this year and I can recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)