The ObserverOttessa MoshfeghReviewThe 2016 Booker nominee’s fable about a New Yorker avoiding life through drug-induced sleep hits its targets with pitiless black humourWhen the US author Ottessa Moshfegh was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker prize with Eileen, a slow-burn psycho-noir narrated by an unloved prison clerk, she let slip that she wrote the book with help from a guide called The 90-Day Novel – a calculated lunge for mainstream success following McGlue, her lauded but commercially disappointing debut set among sailors in 19th-century Zanzibar. “I needed to write something that was going to be reminiscent of the crap that people are used to … How do you expect me to make a living?! I’m not going to be making cappuccinos. I’m fucking brilliant!”
Potentially a Ratner moment (she later said it ruined her chances of winning), the admission stoked the renegade aura of a writer who divides the critics. For some, she’s a ghoulish shock merchant who still manages to be dull; to others, who found Eileen a structurally daring anti-thriller kept afloat by the narrator’s feminist vitriol and confrontationally bad hygiene, Moshfegh has become a pin-up for the fightback against the notion that fictional characters – especially female ones – have to be likable.
Fuelled more or less by voice and concept alone, Moshfegh’s blackly funny new novel does away with the genre crutch she leaned on in Eileen. Taking place in New York over a period of 15 months from mid-June 2000, it follows a twentysomething art history graduate who, after the death of her parents, quits her job at a chi-chi gallery to do little but get bombed on sedatives in a bid to achieve round-the-clock sleep, surfacing now and then only to binge-watch Whoopi Goldberg vehicles and order lingerie online.
As a recipe for drama, it’s far from obvious, despite the endpoint of its very specific timeline. Exactly what it is that the never-named narrator might be opting out of is clarified by visits from a bulimic former schoolmate, Reva, an insurance broker caught in a joyless affair with her married, middle-aged boss; studying Cosmopolitan, watching Sex and the City and regular pilates has, we’re told with no little glee, failed to get Reva the husband, children and career she wanted.
Readers of Eileen won’t be surprised to find the narrator rejecting Reva’s regime. “No moisturising or exfoliating,” she says, glorying in “eye boogers and scum”. But where Eileen was dowdily anonymous, our self-confessed “somnophile” is “tall and thin and blond and pretty and young”, or “hot shit”. Which is no index of happiness, Moshfegh seems to say, as the narrator outlines her semi-abusive relationship with an on-off lover, Trevor, a banker whose “favourite thing” is to “fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep”. Yet in a typically discomfiting swerve, she doesn’t want our concern: “I’d choose him a million times over the hipster nerds … reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook [and passing] off their insecurity as ‘sensitivity’.” “It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny … Trevor probably masturbated to Britney Spears.”
How far you take to My Year of Rest and Relaxation may depend on how entertaining you find this kind of caustic sociological taxonomy. As the narrator nears her goal of 24/7 slumber – aided by an up-and-coming painter infamous for splatter canvases made with his own semen – there are times when the book feels little more than a dead-eyed catalogue of prescription pills and 80s movies spiked with sulky detail (shrimps in a Chinese takeaway are likened to pubic lice; Chardonnay is “piss-coloured”; someone is pointlessly said to look “like a child molester”). And yet, by the end, this comically adversarial narrative seems anything but slight, hitting multiple marks at once: as an art-school prank, a between-the-lines tale of displaced grief and a pitiless anatomy of gender injustice, it also offers (via the inevitable 9/11 ending) a dark state-of-America fable, with Reva paying the heaviest of prices in a climax that painfully – and punitively – casts doubt over which of the novel’s two women has really been asleep.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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