A beautiful, privileged young woman in early-2000s New York attempts to sleep for an entire year, using a cocktail of medications prescribed by a reckless psychiatrist.
About This Book
A young woman with a dead-end art-world job, a Manhattan apartment, and every material advantage decides to spend a year asleep, medicating herself into near-continuous unconsciousness in the belief that she'll emerge renewed. Moshfegh's novel is both a provocation and a portrait: the narrator is beautiful, privileged, unlikeable, and entirely absorbed in her own dissolution, and the book dares you to keep reading about a person actively refusing to participate in her life. It's set in the year before September 2001, and that date hangs over the whole enterprise, giving the narrator's willed oblivion a darker resonance as it approaches. The prose is deadpan, precise, and genuinely funny, the humor coming from the narrator's flat contempt for everyone and everything, including herself, and from the awfulness of the few people in her orbit. Beneath the provocation is a serious book about grief, numbness, and the specific emptiness of having everything and wanting nothing. This is a book for readers who like their fiction strange, dark, and formally daring, who don't need a sympathetic protagonist, and who can appreciate a novel that withholds catharsis for most of its length. Readers wanting warmth, plot, or a character to root for should look elsewhere; the narrator's project is stasis, and the book commits to it. What redeems the deliberate flatness is the ending, which arrives suddenly and reframes the entire year of sleep, giving the narrator's numbness a meaning the reader couldn't have anticipated. It's a divisive book by design, and the qualities that make some readers put it down are the same ones that make others consider it a defining novel of its moment.
Who This Is For
Best for readers who want something unflinching: morally complex, heavy, and honest about the worst of things. The writing rewards attention without being demanding, a good balance of depth and readability. It takes its time, and that's the point. Patience is rewarded. Not the right choice if you're after something comforting or redemptive.
Best Read When
Best read when you're in the mood for something dark and uncompromising, and a read that's slow and deeply immersive.
What It Explores
My Year of Rest and Relaxation explores identity and the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be, loss and what remains after it, and growing up and what gets lost in the process.
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