"My Year of Rest and Relaxation," by Otessa Moshfegh

Otessa Moshfegh’s recent novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (Penguin, 2018), has been getting critical praise and much attention, with words like “profound” being tossed about. For a while, I resisted reading it because the descriptions in the reviews sounded oppressive. But I finally decided to go ahead and see what all the fuss was about. I perhaps should have trusted my original instincts. I found the book – and the main character (who is also the narrator) – annoying and depressing. This young woman, who comes from a privileged but emotionally-starved family, decides to leave her lackluster art gallery job, along with most of her life and friends, and “hibernate” in her apartment in Manhattan, as a rather uncertainly-conceived effort to heal herself from her sadness, depression, alienation and anomie. Most conveniently, she has an inheritance that allows her to do so. She sets out to sleep as much as possible, and to help in this goal, she finds an eccentric and highly unprofessional psychiatrist who freely dispenses all sorts of pills to her in large quantities with multiple refills: anti-depressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, and much more. Both of her parents -- by whom she was emotionally neglected -- have died, and she seems to have very few human connections. One connection is occasional get-togethers with her longtime on-again-off-again “boyfriend” (of sorts), although they see each other rarely and have an unhealthy relationship, to say the least; Trevor is a successful Wall Street type, about ten years older than she is, and truly uncaring and obnoxious. The other main connection is with her college friend, Reva, who is both intrusive and needy, but on some level caring, and whom our main character treats rather badly. Aside from these two people, she mainly only sees her psychiatrist, her doorman, the owners of the local bodega, and the pharmacists at the Rite-Aid where she fills her numerous prescriptions. I do feel sorry for this young woman, but it is also hard not to be put off by her sense of casual entitlement and the by the way she treats everyone in her life. Although the novel is fairly short, one which I would usually devour in a few hours, I found myself reading a little bit and then setting it aside for a few hours or days before returning to it. I did finish it, and I sort of “get” the book, but I was mostly annoyed by it.