MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by OTTESSA MOSHFEGH (2018)

Early in this story, the narrator says that the artwork in the avant-garde gallery where she works is "supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap." That also describes pretty much how I feel about this novel. It is edgy; it is ironic and outrageous; it would seem to have some deep meaning, discernible to the hip and cool, but in the end it seems to me to be just an extremely well-put-together mound of meaningless garbage. If there is a point to this novel, it passed me by. I think it is a literary con job.

The narrator is a recent college graduate, tall, slim, beautiful, and rich, with an inherited income. yet she is devastatingly dissatisfied, alienated, adrift in a drowning sea of existential despair. Her only escape seems to be sleep, so with the help of the world's most irresponsible psychiatrist who is willing to prescribe all the escapist pills available, she spends most of a year in a drugged sleep.

Otessa Moshfegh seems to specialize in stories of people who are beyond the norm. Her previous novel, Eileen, concerned a homely daughter of alcoholics who teetered on the brink of madness. It highly impressed me, particularly in the artistry of its prose and the ability of the author to portray an unsympathetic character in a sympathetic light. I also felt that the novel had a point -- the damage that can be inflicted by alcoholism and just the bad luck to be born poor and ugly. The protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is seemingly the opposite -- rich and beautiful instead of poor and ugly. Perhaps the author is trying to say that even those from fortunate circumstances can be psychologically damaged. I don't know. I do know that this unsympathetic narrator does not arouse even a drop of my sympathy for her unhappy plight.

I am also skeptical of the propriety of a novel which portrays the uninhibited ingestion of random drugs as a solution to problems, particularly in the midst of a drug epidemic with roots in the misuse of prescription medication. An actual person taking the various combinations and amounts of drugs ingested by this protagonist would undoubtedly not survive.

So while this novel is extremely well written and often darkly humorous, I did not like it very much at all. It reminds me of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. I disliked that one, too.