LONG READ: My Year of Rest and Relaxation review - an orgy of privilege and trauma

                                                                       Illustration by Georgina Carey

By George Tomsett

​When Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel entered bookshops in 2018, the world was a very different place. ‘Pandemic’ was a word you only heard in low-budget disaster films; the chokehold of social media - as the exclusive medium through which we interpret and internalise the world - was far more forgiving, allowed more stolen breaths, and, indeed, the Twitter-sphere was somehow marginally less toxic than it has become in 2020. The year we will all remember - or, rather, won’t remember, as we, like Moshfegh’s protagonist, find ourselves in an unrelenting blur of misinformation, fury and very, very postmodern confusion. That is why, upon reading Moshfegh’s novel during lockdown in Spain (where for eight weeks we weren’t allowed to go outside for a leisure walk), the sheer brutalising force of Moshfegh’s masterpiece in quarantine fiction was felt fully and repeatedly. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me want to jump out of a window - but it also forced me to muse on how, somewhere in the noise, there have indeed been genii in literature charting our civilisational decline, and our descent into the hyper-sexualised, hyper-racialised, hyper-political environment we have all found ourselves in today. 
 
The importance of this novel simply cannot be understated, nor can its incredible attacks on all of the supposed truths and narratives perpetuated by both ends of the political spectrum. It is as much a diagnosis of postmodern inertia as it is a prognosis of where it will go, if we in the West - our communities, our nations, our individual selves - don’t have a long hard look in the mirror. And fast.
 
In loose terms, My Year of Rest and Relaxation charts the efforts of its unnamed protagonist and narrator (a New York WASP type) to put herself to sleep for a year, ‘Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.’ She uses a cocktail of Xanax-like drugs, many of which are fictional, to ensure her hibernation, born of a desire to avoid the vulgarities of a globalising modern world, and, of course, the vulgarities of her own life and privilege. It is a story of self-isolation, centring equally on both the ‘self’ part and the ‘isolation’ part, painting its chronically unlikeable narrator with the broadest of strokes, initially, and then going back to fill in the details. However, her ‘rest and relaxation’ are heavily interrupted throughout the novel, most notably by her best friend (who she also absolutely hates), Reva; the Jewish, try-hard bulimic girl who epitomises toxic diet culture and its more relentless 1990s, Kate Moss era, ‘heroin-chic’ roots, ‘Will you swear to take a ski trip this year? It burns so many calories.’ Reva is the antithesis to our apathetic, hopeless narrator, simply by virtue of having the energy to pretend to have hope. 
 
When the narrator is sleeping, Reva is running around New York trying absolutely everything to change herself and feel some sense of acceptance in the world to no effect; having an affair with her boss, finding a new diet, buying new clothes, reading a new self-help book. She is in many ways an embryonic version of the anxiety-ridden, petrified, self-centred people that make up a good proportion of young people today. She is, like many people living in the world now, a mess, although the mess seems to be funnelled from the outside in, as opposed to the other way around - her internal landscapes are ravaged by the wide, endless cityscape of New York and all of its toxicity. Her futile attempts to latch on to past innocence, her Freudian slips telling of untold insecurities, her cognitive dissonance in prescribing Oprah advice to others knowing full well that such pithy, useless nuggets of supposed wisdom will never save anyone, will certainly never save herself. The relationship Reva has with herself, her own body and mind, is totally depraved, and is matched only by her relationship with our foggy-headed narrator. 
 
Reva’s untimely apparitions make up the bulk of the novel’s narrative, saving it from being too intermittent between drugged up sleeps: ‘I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.’ Of course, true to many contemporary novels, there are absolutely no likeable characters in this novel, bar perhaps the insane quack, Dr. Tuttle, from whom the narrator sources her multifarious sedatives and anti-insomnia drugs. These pills are prescribed monthly by this wacky, jittery doctor, who in my mind is literally just the divination teacher, Professor Trelawney, in Harry Potter. Dr Tuttle’s total lack of sanity and seeming lack of legality hint that, certainly, for many, many years pre-Donald Trump, Epstein, Weinstein, and whoever else, people have held positions of power and authority in spite of being either totally insane, totally unqualified or downright dangerous. But Dr. Tuttle is merely a crazy doctor in a darkened downtown office. It would appear Moshfegh is presenting the postmodern world to her readers as a staircase on which we, in 2020, are high up on. As we look down the staircase - through the lens of the novel - at the pre-9/11 West, a supposedly innocent, healthy time, we are baffled to discover that we already had a foot on the first step.
 
In this bleary eyed, semi-conscious traipse through pre-9/11 New York and the psychological landscapes of its narrator, Moshfegh paints a very clear image of the West before its greatest trauma as a familiar place of sadness, injustice and pain, though its victims, and indeed culprits, are totally inverted from the modern internalisations. In Moshfegh’s New York, the individual is more than their class, race or origin, and is worthy of rigorous study from a devotedly humanist pair of eyes - not eyes ravaged by the divisive rantings of the far-right and far-left Twitter handles who ultimately preach the exact same thing; essentialism, the notion that the boxes you tick on applications regarding your sexuality, skin colour, nation of birth, family income, et cetera, all predetermine your beliefs and experiences, as well as, more worryingly and disturbingly, your innate, inherent being. Moshfegh couldn’t be clearer in her rejection of this school of thought, leaving us no choice but to look at her characters and their very privileged problems as paradoxically legitimate and worthy. It’s radical stuff. The slow build of emotion is so gradual you find your better self trying to quash your undoubted emotional response out of a devotion to your initial disgust towards the characters. But the harrowing vignettes of the narrator’s parents’ deaths, her helplessness, the lack of sympathy or kindness afforded to her are all too hard to deny. She is a victim, it seems, of her own privilege, where Reva is a victim of her own torturous proximity to privilege.
 
The cover of the book declares My Year of Rest and Relaxation ‘a relentlessly savage fable of privilege and pain’, and, really, this description could not be more accurate. Admittedly I expected, and maybe even hoped, this book would be more of an exposé on ‘privilege’, a term which has become increasingly weaponised, and that Moshfegh would delve into the ills and woes of an existence uncharacterised by a lack of money - money purportedly being the antidote to ills and woes, particularly in America and Britain - two of the most viciously capitalist societies in the world. 
 
But the reality is, of course, very different. It is a fable, not just because of its characters and their unwelcome fates, but for us - for the reader. We undergo a catharsis, a purging of sorts, merely by reading it. Moshfegh ushers the 2020 reader into her world of art history majors, Upper East Side apartments and white-walled galleries, with all of our social media generation sensitivities and cancellation tendencies intact, with the smug and certain knowledge that, upon closing her book, we will feel totally at a loss for words, and our brains will have no choice but to actually engage in some critical thinking that extends beyond the notion that things are as simple as they seem through our phones. Why, you wonder? And how? What can this book, written by a Boston-born woman who is half-Croatian and half-Iranian, possibly offer up to the very Western conversation about whiteness, blackness, Jewishness, and, wait, 9/11? 
 
In a climate where ‘whiteness’ has seen its usage almost double in the last twenty years, mostly when being named as the ultimate soul and skeleton of all oppressive frameworks on Earth by the far-left, and where anti-Semitism is spewed constantly by both far-left and far-right organisations and voices, and where the thousands of lives lost on 9/11 have lost their weight as a national, and indeed global, trauma, Moshfegh’s portrayal of a traumatised and culturally victimised white woman and a traumatised and culturally victimised Jewish woman flips the postmodern script. It is the lack of adherence to postmodern sensibilities which is most startling; it is a novel oozing in outright offensiveness that will have even the most staunch rejector of identity politics cringing and wondering how on Earth this novel made it on to so many high-profile magazine and celebrity reading lists during lockdown. 
 
Even the portrayal of mental health and trauma is wildly offensive; her evocations of the fragility of the mind and innocence are both devastating and wholly depressing, whilst she also, arguably, sacrifices 9/11 at the alter of the ego - or as some kind of sick externalisation of the narrator’s internal experience. 9/11 is the spectre that looms in the corner of the novel, daring to rear its head at any given moment, daring us to consider just how much the world changed that day, how its reverberations still linger, how it was the definite end of an undeterminable era which was not necessarily bad, nor necessarily good, but, clearly, far quieter. An era where the world was simply what was in front of you, or, in Reva’s case, in magazines. An era where the world could be shut out, or closed like a book. Until, of course, that day came around, and the world became louder. And scarier.
 
The novel’s offensiveness is not meant to offend, necessarily, but, rather, urge us to reassess our values and worldview, and put them to other contexts which do not fit the pushed and propagated narrative of postmodern essentialism. Can wealthy, educated, privileged people be irrevocably traumatised? Can wealthy, educated, privileged people be victimised and traumatised by the systems they supposedly uphold? As Dr. Tuttle manically tells our narrator, ‘Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you've probably learned, having gone to Columbia.’ And do WASPs, or any city’s middle classes or scapegoated minorities or majorities, really ‘uphold’ oppressive systems, or can the individuals behind all broad terms - white, Jew, WASP, Asian, graduate or otherwise - be victims of such systems too? ‘I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things - held down a job, for example - I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.’ And what exactly are the systems of oppression we are so keen on changing? Where do they really stem from today? From an orphaned white woman locked away in her Upper East Side apartment, or from somewhere far more obvious? Does constantly talking about abuse further traumatise victims of abuse? What about one’s appearance? And, in the hilarious and shocking moments where the novel’s greatest abuser, exploiter, and most active upholder of oppression is the Asian American artist, Ping Xi (a regular fixture at the narrator’s gallery job), what comment do we feel is being made? Is the race of Ping Xi relevant at all? The answer is most likely a big no. He is a douchebag artist who makes douchebag art for douchebag rich people. 
 
To Moshfegh, it would seem the post-racial society was a more plausible and helpful notion before the advent of social media made the overconsumption of racial stereotypes and racist speech within multi-ethnic Western societies unavoidable. Before the advent of social media allowed unrelenting dramatics and outrage to outweigh intellect - as evinced by Ping Xi’s art, which involves him sticking pigment into the tip of his penis and ejaculating on to canvases. Before social media allowed one hundred and forty characters to outweigh entire books, entire careers, entire think tanks and statistics. Before big tech and big governments, from China to the United States, began stealing our data and our privacy, and got us hooked on the postmodern stream of liquidised, instant heroin that is seeing the very worst of the world and humanity recorded and played on an endless loop - every single waking moment of every day. 
 
I don’t know. There have been many critical thinkers who have flayed the postmodern world we live in, with all its far-right demagogs and illiberal liberalism, and suggested identity politics is in fact a ploy that plays right into the hands of capitalists. Such thinkers vouch that we are undergoing a process of classic divide and rule. Let the plebs fight over this, let them fight over that, let them never recognise and identify the real issues at hand - that is, the hoarding of over half of the world’s wealth by a mere group of individuals small enough to fit on a Boeing 747, who are of all shapes and sizes, born of all nations, and are of all creeds. But look over there!
 
Moshfegh encourages us to look into the macro at the micro. To look beyond systems and instead at the individuals caught between them - in less obvious, less clear-cut ways. To the news exhausted, tense, scared reader of 2020, My Year of Rest and Relaxation begs the question that perhaps when we garner a world view through a phone, the souls and the humanity of our friends and neighbours, of our Earth’s nations and societies, begin to slip out of view, out of relevance, as we slowly and cancerously come to believe that the greatest oppressions and injustices in this world are within systems we can somehow blame on and indeed see in our friends and neighbours, on the people down the road. Despite being set nearly twenty years ago, the philosophy of the eponymous year of rest and ‘relaxation’ takes its props from the philosophy of social media, as Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker writes that the narrator’s obsession with sleep as a method of healing ‘resembles a form of cognitive interaction induced by social media, which positions the user as the center of the universe and everything else—current events, other people’s feelings—as ephemeral, increasingly meaningless stimuli.’ Meanwhile, we explain away the endless 9/11s of the world - that is, real world, tangible trauma on every imaginable scale - as being anything, absolutely anything, than what they really are. In fact, we say they are our fault, or the conspiracy theorists go wild and say it was the fault of lizard people who run the world and are also pedophiles, because of something to do with pizza that I haven’t really got my head around yet. 
 
So exhausting becomes the finger-pointing, the violence, the misaligned fury, the radicalisation, that you find yourself retreating, curling up into your bed, and wishing to sleep away the whole year, uninterrupted by the vulgarities of the modern world, uninterrupted by anything or anyone. At the end of the novel, where it would appear the narrator’s hibernation has actually worked in healing her, there is a vague air of happiness which snakes thinly around the language like silky smoke, suggesting this novel is not actually an exercise in avoiding pain, but rather an exercise in feeling it. Being saturated in it. Baptised in it. For, in her frantic attempts at self-sedation, the narrator ultimately felt the full force of her life, and her past.
 
But we, lacking orphan status, an apartment in Manhattan and the fictional drugs afforded to the narrator, cannot hibernate. Not even, and especially, during a global pandemic. We are forced to go on - just as, throughout the novel, we sincerely, selfishly hope the narrator and Reva will find the strength to do so too, as it will somehow make our own hapless existences within the systems we, too, cannot change, and which we know are morbidly unjust, somehow more digestible. We dive into our phones to look away, but also to pseudo-witness the evils of the world and get angry, and then scared. It’s a vicious circle.
 
On the book’s final page, we see, however, shockingly and heroically, just how much of an enormous, fatal lie we have swallowed in believing we don’t have a choice in our own happiness in a world that does not naturally give way to happy existences. The solution, it seems, is to confront the very thing we are forced to live with, forced to foster, forced to model and remodel as best we can - the self. If the world around us really is crumbling, why not focus on something smaller, closer to home? 
 
Ottessa Moshfegh’s point is that the globalised world has sleepwalked into chaos, but this stumbling journey started long before 2001. 9/11 was just - to return to the staircase of postmodernism thing - a mere step on the journey to where we are now - albeit a huge one. 
 
The narrator finds peace in the early postmodern by rejecting it, and so it would seem that, in order to make the current world a better, fairer, happier place, we must start - as inconvenient and apolitical and painful as it may be - with quietly but decidedly rejecting the postmodern world and our skewed understanding of it, and focusing, for once, on bettering the individual. On bettering the self. The world invariably becomes a better, fairer, happier place if you, yourself, feel better, fairer and happier. And, according to Moshfegh, this is done by feeling one’s pain. Understanding one’s life. Reckoning with our trauma - if not something specific, then the fact that we are literally living on a planet that we are told every single day is going to be inhospitable for half its population within our lifetime. We must take a long, hard look in the mirror. We must learn to be introspective. We must ask ourselves whether we are contributing to the postmodern script, or whether we are flipping it. 
 
On the back-loop of this civilisation, will you choose love, or will you choose fear? For Moshfegh, it’s all down to you. The postmodern isn’t going anywhere any time soon. If My Year of Rest and Relaxation preaches anything, it’s that you have the hard-won right to totally reject the postmodern world, if you care enough to. If you wish. Alas, in 2020, maybe it’s time, at this distance from normalcy, we focus a little more on being ‘wide awake’, and not just helplessly, hopelessly, oh so blindly ‘woke’. 
 
Look around, neighbour. Who’s the real enemy?