In Haruki Murakami's After Dark we meet Eri, an attractive young woman who has decided to “go to sleep”, and who lies in bed in a sort of suspended animation, a cross between a latter-day Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Murakami's is a magical world, and typically, no explanation is given to us as to the why and how of this extraordinary event.

Not so in Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel. Its narrator is a 24-year old Columbia graduate who, having last her parents in close succession, and disillusioned with the art scene in which she works (and with the world in general) decides to undergo a self-imposed regime of 'sleep therapy'. There are those who, faced with an existential crisis, go on a retreat or undergo a spiritual epiphany. Instead, over a 12-month period between 2000 and 2001, the novel's protagonist goes into near-hibernation, with the help of a mind-numbing list of mind-numbing substances. "These are conveniently prescribed and sometimes supplied by her psychiatrist Dr Tuttle : There was no shortage of psychiatrists in New York City, but finding one as irresponsible and weird as Dr Tuttle would be a challenge..."

Solfoton, Ambien, Robitussin, Nembutal, Zyprexa - anything to go to sleep. And then there's Infermiterol - the closest we get to a magic potion in this book. Each pill sends the narrator on a three-day long bout of sleepwalking, of which no memory remains after the event except for photographs evidencing nights of riotous hedonism.

This novel is an uncompromising work. It displays acerbic wit and a strong dose of black humour, but whether this will provide the reader with any "rest and relaxation" is a different matter altogether. For a start, its protagonist is difficult to love. Clearly highly intelligent and spot-on in her observations, she is also egoistical and egotistical, and her apparent disdain of society also extends to her only friend, whom she treats with an irritating sense of superiority (or is hers an inverted inferiority complex?) The vacuity of a year spent in hibernation, the images of soulless sex and materialistic, degraded art, sometimes rub off on the novel itself, which grows tiring at intervals.

And yet there's much to admire in this work, whether one opts to read it as an expression of millennial angst or a darkly comic critique of the contemporary art world or of Western society. The pleasure afforded by this novel is at times akin to the guilty, voyeuristic fascination some find in watching a car crash. But perhaps this is how it is meant to be.

I roller coaster of a book! Never stops, drug taking mania and general breakdown induced dramatics! Skipped through bits where it got a bit repetitive but there were times it was interesting and touching

The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is blonde, thin, pretty and rich. She owns her own apartment on the Upper East Side in New York. Serena Van Der Woodsen would want to be her best friend. As she is rich, let's call her $.
$ has problems. She is blank and affectless. $ has an on-off boyfriend, Trevor, who treats her like a sex toy. That $ prefers this level of engagement is not healthy. Her long-suffering friend Reva thinks she needs what $ has. Reva is a victim of wanting what society tells her to want. For this, $ treats her with contempt. She's not a nice person. A sharp and deeply unlikable voice. The level of cruelty is refreshing . I think the author, Ottessa Moshfegh, is seeing how much she can get away with.
So why is $ like this, and what is she going to do about it? Flashbacks show her becoming traumatised by her parents’ neglect. At best, $ is treated like an inconvenience. Certainly unwanted and unloved. Sleep is the answer. A year of trouble free sleep in her apartment. America is somewhere where you can get anything if you have enough money, so $ finds the least reputable prescriber of pills she can find. Dr Tuttle is a hilarious creation, blind to the consequences of her actions. Neither her, nor the pharmacists who dish out the meds like sweeties, ever ask any questions.
A certain blue collar comedian recently got fired for tweeting whilst on Ambien. This novel takes this idea a lot further. Most of the action in the book is hidden from the reader. It takes place during an increasing number of blackouts. As money is no object, $ liberally uses her credit card, goes to parties, makes appointments, all under the influence of a prescription drugs cocktail. With the level of description of excess and cruelty My Year of Rest and Relaxation often reminded me of American Psycho. Like that book, it really gets under your skin.

The unnamed narrator leads a privileged but empty life. Her plan to deal with this is to sleep as much as she can.

The second novel by Ottessa Mosfegh – author of “Eileen” – one of a number of books that spearheaded the “unlikeable female” narrator genre –relying on confrontational, unfiltered behaviour and calculated “grossness” (the first of which I can appreciate, the second of which always reminds me of nothing more than my experience in youth groups with young-ish children who think they can shock leaders by using swear words and sexual terms they have just learnt).

The unnamed narrator of this book lives in some privilege in her fully owned apartment in New York; although privilege earned by the successive deaths – from cancer and pill/alcohol suicide – of her parents; parents who were distant from each other and from her even during her childhood. She has an on-off, relationship with Trevor (a sado-masochist and commitment-phobe), works on the fringes of the New York art scene – in a conceptual art gallery – in late 2000/early 2001 but rejects much if not all of the lives she sees around her and takes refuge in drugs, alcohol and cynicism.

Her only real friend is Reva – Reva’s (largely thwarted) aspirations are everything that the narrator is trying to escape: she is devastated by the cancer her mother is suffering; she is slowly climbing the corporate ladder, as an assistant at the insurance broker Marsh; searching for love – having an affair with her clearly manipulative married boss; obsessed with exercise classes, designer clothes she cannot afford and weight loss to the point of bulimia and declaiming (so often it becomes her signature phase) “no fair” at the narrator’s own natural slimness and beauty and inherited style (which the narrator reminds us about constantly).

Reva’s weight obsession adds some humour to the book: getting pregnant by her lover (who immediately engineers her a promotion to her firm’s office in the World Trade Centre) she remarks “The doctor said the abortion won’t cause any dramatic weight loss, but I’ll take it” and after her mother’s death, wasted away by cancer: “She probably weighed half of what I weigh now. Well, maybe not half exactly. But she was super skinny. Skinnier than Kate Moss, even.”

Reva seems to take her beliefs and ideas from the trite and cliched world of Hallmark cards, lifestyle magazines and corporate mission statements – the narrator observations on Reva are (as one might expect from this genre) caustic and cruelly humourous:

“I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.”

But Reva’s life and attitudes somehow act as a remedy for the narrator’s malaise:

“Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away”

A remedy but not a panacea – and the narrator turns instead to sleep - the only shared activity she had with her mother: “I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep.”

She locates a comically bad psychiatrist to assist her, whose sole skills (but ones that are invaluable for the narrator’s purposes) are the ability to track down the latest drugs from internet articles and (more importantly) a fine judgement of how many, and at what frequency and quantity, she can prescribe without causing issues with health insurers.

The narrator’s somnophilia causes her to lose her job (which she reacts to in a thankfully relatively rare outbreak of Eileen-style grossness by defecating on the floor of the gallery and stuffing the soiled tissues into the mouth of a stuffed dog forming part of an exhibition) and to take up systematically sleeping as a one-year sabattical:

“I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”

To her initial disquiet, she discovers a drug which rather than making her sleep seems to induce in her an extreme form of somnambulism – rendering her unaware of her actions for three days at a time. But over time decides to embrace this as the culmination of her sleep experiment – and she strikes a deal with a conceptual artist from the gallery, who has access to paint her during the episodes in exchange for keeping her supplied for her intervals of lucidity.

And unfortunately it is at this point that the book veers from, promising into (in my view) tedium with pages of drugs taken, television programmes binge-watched.

The book then culminates in an ending which was obviously foreshadowed throughout the book (and this review) – and really does very little with this idea other than with the closing words about a “jumper” <i>“There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”</i>

This book is I think meant to be around the sleepiness and then awakening of the New York art scene, up to and including 2001 – but did not really succeed for me at all. Some of the book is clearly a parody of conceptual art, but that is an art-form which is by its very nature self-parodying and does not need literary assistance.

I think in conclusion this is one for fans of Eileen - and probably not for those who like me did not enjoy that book.


My thanks to Random House and Net Galley for the ARC.

I really enjoyed reading and finishing this book today. So dark and shallow to start, but turns deep in its own time and the writing is addictive, I couldn't put it down. Rich smart emotionally lost gallery girl in NYC in the 1990s decides to heal herself with a year of drugs. Surprised me, highly recommend.

This book has no real plot and I absolutely could not stand the main character/narrator, but nevertheless I found it strangely compelling and could not put it down. It reminded me a little of Claire-Louise Bennett's brilliant "Pond" and I know exactly which of my customers I am going to recommend it to.

What a bold, original, uncompromising writer Moshfegh is! If I fell in love with her work with Eileen, then this book has sealed my adoration.

On the surface, this is a kind of non-story: ‘I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old.’ The unnamed narrator self-medicates with the help of a crazy-mad psychiatrist (‘there was no shortage of psychiatrists in New York City, but finding one as irresponsible and weird as Dr Tuttle would be a challenge’) in order to sleep her way through life – but actually, there’s a strange but compelling method behind her madness: ‘it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.’

And what is it that needs saving? The narrator is model-beautiful, thin, bright (she has a degree from Columbia), has a job in an art gallery and inherited money... but she senses a spiritual hollowness in both herself and wider American (Western?) culture – and her existential quest is to re-set herself, to find meaning beyond the superficial, the commercial/capitalist, the trite.

If this sounds grim and hard-work, trust me, it’s not. Part of Moshfegh’s genius is in finding a black humour in this story. The voice is immaculate, the story strangely gripping – but also layered enough to create characters we both laugh at and yet empathise with – witness the narrator’s ‘best friend’ who lives her life via the fictions of women’s glamour magazines.

And through it all, Moshfegh knows precisely where she wants to end up – with a stunning final image: ‘There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide-awake’. The full resonance of this will only be revealed once you read this wonderful, important, utterly contemporary book.