Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Genre: Contemporary
Blurb: Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
Me: I've seen this incredible cover everywhere, and finally decided to see what the hype was about. Definitely nothing like I expected, but not too groundbreaking or even really that interesting.
The Ups: I don't know if it was the pink text or the cover, but I expected this book to be some sort of fictional Eat, Pray, Love experience- delving into an imaginary year where we could entirely disconnect and just do a ton of self-care. It was not that at ALL, and much better for it. The book was actually told by a very funny, snarky protagonist who is trying to sleep her way through an entire year instead of dealing with her grief and her sense of loneliness. The premise was jarring for the first bit of the book, and should have been boring after a while but surprisingly wasn't! Moshfegh did a really good job of making such a mundane, repetitive experience still compelling to read- I didn't feel bored reading it.
I think so much of that was because the voice of the main protagonist- though she kept bringing up that she was conventionally beautiful, wealthy, and privileged, her personality cut through any sense of unrelatability. She treats people pretty horribly but admits that she does, and it was hilarious and quite refreshing to see a female character that quite simply did not care if people knew her real, selfish, and lazy desires.
The Downs: Yet the book fell flat for me in every other way. I didn't think the book had any "deep" point or sensation to justify all the pages talking about taking sleeping pill after sleeping pill; I wasn't entirely convinced by the protagonist's ability to get back on track. I also felt like the ending was inevitable and poignant on its own, but it didn't add anything to the rest of the novel. It just felt not cohesive and at the end of the day, kinda pointless. What was the year of rest and relaxation for? I still have no idea.
My greatest issue with the book, though, was its blatant and constant anti-Asian racism. It came up again and again, despite the character having no real friends or family that are Asian American. Asian women were continuously to belittle a certain type of white man; she explicitly says it at one point, and then a half-Asian female was the wife of a businessman with whom Reva was having an affair. A random New Yorker article about the harshness of Chinese American families is brought up in dialogue. And most blatantly, Ping Xi, a Chinese artist who appears in the book quite frequently is described in pretty horrendous stereotypes: reptilian, almost female-looking. He even has an exhibit of stuffed dogs that he is rumored to have killed himself. Like come. on.
It bothered me a lot, because the racism served no purpose throughout the novel which makes me think it wasn't a deliberate choice to make a complex narrator but genuine sentiment from the author's perspective. It was quite concerning and made the book from a mediocre to a plain bad one for me.
Rating: 2 kisses!
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