V171 reviewed My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
None
4 stars
Laugh out loud funny, plotless, and dripping with satire. This was a great read, but lacked some of the bite I've comes to love from Moshfegh's works.
It's time to go to sleep, whether her body wants to or not. Our narrator is a young, recent Columbia graduate living in Manhattan, but doesn't have much else going on in her life. Her parents are dead, her on-again-off-again, toxic situationship seems to have cut her loose for good. She managed to get fired from the easiest job in the world, but it doesn't matter because her inheritance has her set up financially. The only "disruptor" in her life is her "best friend" Reva, someone who seems polar opposite to herself. But it's all just too much, she needs, maybe a year, to just rest. So she finds the quackiest psychiatrist she can find in the city and gets to work. And …
Laugh out loud funny, plotless, and dripping with satire. This was a great read, but lacked some of the bite I've comes to love from Moshfegh's works.
It's time to go to sleep, whether her body wants to or not. Our narrator is a young, recent Columbia graduate living in Manhattan, but doesn't have much else going on in her life. Her parents are dead, her on-again-off-again, toxic situationship seems to have cut her loose for good. She managed to get fired from the easiest job in the world, but it doesn't matter because her inheritance has her set up financially. The only "disruptor" in her life is her "best friend" Reva, someone who seems polar opposite to herself. But it's all just too much, she needs, maybe a year, to just rest. So she finds the quackiest psychiatrist she can find in the city and gets to work. And it's hard work, having to down dozens of different pills, come to three days later, hope she didn't call her ex in her sleep or send photos to random men on AOL, grab a bodega coffee and down more pills. Reva continues to be a disruption in her life, constantly talking about herself and her dying mother and the affair with her boss.. but at least there's Whoopi Goldberg VHS tapes and her 22 prescriptions.
Critics will say that nothing happens in this book and they are right, but that does not make this book bad by any measure. Firstly, this is funny. I laughed out loud several times. The conversations with the psychiatrist alone made this a great read. But at the root of it, it feels like this is an exploration of something that all of us have wanted and different times of our lives. Just to clock the fuck out. Not to die, just... rest. And this is a funny, not very realistic exploration of that dream coming true for the worst girl you knew in college.
There was a certain.. grit that I was missing here though. I was expecting something slightly darker, not quite Lapvona levels, but maybe a tone more similar to Eileen. I think the tone of this book did suit the story well, but I think Moshfegh really excels when toeing the line towards disgust and contempt. This felt more palatable. But I still found it enjoyable.
