Escapism, the Old-Fashioned Way in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
By Ella Briggs
While social media allows us to stay hyper informed about nearly every international and domestic conflict, naturally, most of the information it brings is inherently painful, and understandably prompts urges to engage in escapism. In recent years, the rise of global fascism, rapid deterioration of the environment, and ramifications of a pandemic have created even more of a demand in any market that can effectively offer an escape from reality. I doubt that anyone with a cell phone would refuse a brief respite from their anxious thoughts and the circumstances that prompt them.
Like many Ottesa Moshfegh books, her 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows an unreliable female narrator who struggles with themselves and the world but hopes—if fleetingly—to improve enough so that life may become bearable. Worthy of comparison, another of Moshfegh’s novels, Death in Her Hands,, is narrated by Vesta Gul, a lonely old woman who struggles to maintain her fleeting sanity after discovering an anonymous note in the woods proclaiming the murder of a girl named Magda. With her dog, Charlie, as her only companion, Vesta has moved to the dreary town of Levant after her condescending, controlling, and unfaithful husband dies of testicular cancer. Vesta’s severe neurosis and overactive imagination lead her to engage in elaborate daydreams, spending hours concocting fantastical backstories for every imaginable character that walks into her eyeline or mindscape. As the narration becomes increasingly unreliable the reader witnesses the unraveling of Vesta’s psyche in real time.
In the case of Vesta Gul, her every anxiety is fully fleshed out while she sternly holds herself to very high standards of internal and external composure. By contrast, the narrator of My Year of Rest has no standards for herself and devotes all of her energy into quieting her brain and dulling her senses, seeking rebirth in the only activity that “really mattered” and “felt productive”: sleep.
The novel opens as the unnamed narrator details her first stages of “hibernating”, detailing how she manages to have all the time in the world to spend as little time being conscious as possible. Set on the Upper East Side in the early 2000s prior to the 9/11 attacks, the story is narrated in the first person by a woman who has recently graduated from Columbia University with a degree in art history. The first interaction is between the narrator and her best frienemy, Reva, a poor, alcoholic, image-obsessed bulimic who tolerates the constant verbal abuse the friendship puts her through because she is addicted to indulging her deep envy of the narrator’s natural good looks and unearned wealth. Their interaction quickly introduces us to just how cruel the narrator truly is as she offers no comfort to Reva’s anxieties about her dying mother and tells her directly that she has no interest in continuing their friendship. When Reva becomes understandably upset, the narrator holds in laughter at this reaction, comparing it to an Adolf Hitler impression, bearing in mind thatReva is Jewish, Sheis also completely indifferent to hearing the voicemail Reva leaves within an hour, forgiving and adoring the narrator after receiving no apology.
The narrator affords her lifestyle with the inheritance money that came to her in her junior year of college, when her father died of cancer and her mother from suicide a few weeks later. Through characteristically unemotional flashbacks, we learn that the narrator was raised in a cold and detached household where she was treated as an inconvenience—if any attention was
paid to her at all. Her mother was an alcoholic narcissist who also dabbled in pills while her father existed as a passive, distant intellectual who was mostly a semi-vacant presence in the house. The narrator refuses to confront both the grief of losing her parents and the unresolved childhood trauma she holds, although this is the most obvious explanation for her “project” and what she wishes to gain from it.
Above all, the narrator seeks total transformation, which she has convinced herself can only come from an entire year of sleep. The narrator, aware of her misery and genuinely hoping to be free of it, stays alive in order to accomplish what is a bizarre certainty to her: “I knew in my heart… that once I’d sleep enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person… 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.” A significant portion of the novel is composed of the narrator emphasizing how desperately she wishes to be reborn, adding a thin layer of optimism to her otherwise fatalistic tone. With the help of Dr. Tuttle, a quack psychiatrist who can’t remember her patient’s basic medical history and is exceedingly liberal with her prescription pad usage, the narrator becomes an expert at mixing dozens of different medications—some real and some fictional—with the accuracy of a chemist to achieve the variety and quality of sleep she hopes to experience.
What is most impressive about this novel is the fact that it is not primarily motivated by plot; the character’s primary goal is to block out all stimuli and experience nothing. Yet Moshfegh has managed to write a gripping, witty, pointed novel that revolves entirely around being unconscious of the world. While well-paced, the plot develops only as much as the character does, and it is difficult to resist getting swept up in the narrator’s witty, coherent, yet skewed closed-loop stream of consciousness. Usually cutting and pithy, the narrator’s descent
into her chemically-induced sleep schedule comes witha shift in prose. The narrative voice softens, and flowery language is no longer exclusively reserved for insults: “As I crossed Broadway, a sliver of moon appeared in the pale sky, then disappeared behind the buildings. The air had a metallic tinge to it. The world felt still and eerie, vibrating.” The experience of reading the novel itself is similar to a dream, with complex thematic nuances rendered that can be easily missed amongst the narrator’s glee of hating the world. Interestingly, most of the narrator’s goals imitate circumstances similar to those surrounding the death of her parents. From the numbness that immediately followed their passing to the metaphorical (then literal) coma that the narrator’s mother experiences before dying, the effectiveness of this experiment could be measured as the degree of success to which the narrator has inadvertently gone through the tried-and-true psychotherapeutic practice of reprocessing trauma.
Moshfegh’s female characters are notorious for their unlikability and My Year’s narrator is no exception as she consistently treats the people surrounding her—particularly Reva—in a way that borders on the likes of a mean-girl caricature. Swaddled in wealth, whiteness, thinness, beauty, and education, yet finding a way to be miserable and deeply cruel, it could be argued that the narrator serves to satirize white women who use their trauma and/or mental illness to separate themselves from their privilege and feign oppression. That being said, the narrator does not make any attempt to apologize or excuse. She rarely acknowledges her viciousness (although she does acknowledge her privilege) and every glimpse of self-awareness is presented with complete indifference. She is simply bored of herself, of those around her, and of the general act of being conscious.
No matter how personally invested I am in Moshfegh’s novels, I cannot avoid discussing the objective repetition of settings, character archetypes, and plot points that stretch across her works, almost like plucking pieces of paper out of a hat. Depressed woman. Isolated. Unreliable narration. Cancer. Seeking escape through sleep. Fichtean Curve. Moshfegh is so obviously excellent in her ability to balance humor and darkness, to create dimensional characters, to command prose in a distinctly powerful way. I just hope to see more variety, more risk. In all fairness, Moshfegh is still technically emerging into the greater sphere of literature, and I very much look forward to witnessing her further grow and develop as a disruptive, candid, and hilarious novelist.
Wanting to completely tune out reality is a desire that has become all too familiar. Very few things could have expedited the increase in the amount of time we use screens more than the series of extended quarantine/lockdown periods that warped time and our collective sanity. At the risk of sounding nihilistic, what exactly about the general state of affairs am I to be rejoicing in, exactly? The pandemic and its tragic fallout has made escapism a hot commodity. For some, a departure from reality was functionally forced onto them, as the opioid epidemic—brought on and sustained by many of the drugs named in My Year—took a grave turn for the worse. These circumstances create the potential for My Year of Rest and Relaxation to be a cringe-worthy read of an apathetic, mean, rich white woman, whining in a luxurious cocoon she has chosen to isolate herself in. Or, it can serve as a reminder of the value of humor in desolate times, of the timelessness and flexibility of art, of the omnipresence of opportunity for creation and talent, of a feminist embrace of a disgusting, gorgeous, anonymous woman. Perhaps, it is both.