Asleep

I’m reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and it’s a bit of a slog. I’m 83% finished, according to my Kindle, and it will take me another day or so to work my way through those last few chapters.

I think I’m too old for this book, is what it is. It’s not hard to read in the traditional sense of difficulty in a book. But it’s a hard story to bear, in which the first-person narrator, a young woman who is never named (I’m spotting a trend), spends a year trying to remain in a drug-induced sleep for as much time as possible.

The character is beautiful, rich, and alienated from everyone and everything. She is grieving the loss of her parents, but her grief isn’t recognizable as such because she didn’t know her parents very well, nor did she like them very much. And the reader doesn’t blame her for this, based on the brief interactions we have with her cold and distant father and her beautiful, selfish mother.

The character (why the unnamed characters? why?) is, I guess, an exemplar of hopelessness and disaffection among millenials, although the book is not quite contemporary (it is set in 2001). The story walks the reader through the natural outcome of extreme selfishness, especially in families.  More than anything else, it reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis--some of the angst and ennui and despair of Less than Zero and lots of the mindless materialism and social taxonomic snobbery and casual, brutal sex of American Psycho. The narrator’s endless recital of designer labels and brand names, and her constant disdainful observations about her erstwhile friend’s (friend--singular) declassee Long Island background reads like every icy cold 1980s downtown New York novel.

*****
I finally finished it. I never read book reviews, but I read a few reviews of this one because I honestly didn’t know what to make of it and I wanted a reality check. I had missed one big idea completely, which is that My Year is a satire on the millennial obsession with “self-care.” I don’t necessarily think that millennials are any more selfish and self-indulgent than any other generation. I don’t even think that they’re any more preoccupied with self-care than we were. They just talk about it more and in a more public way, because they can. Once you turn something into hashtag, it’s an easy target for satirists. And "self-care" is as good a metaphor for disaffection and despair as any other.

The more I think about My Year, the more I think that all the fuss about it might be right. It has something to say about what it means to be a person, especially what it means to be a young woman. A person like the character in this book, raised by cold and selfish parents who regard her existence as an inconvenience and an outrageous encroachment on their autonomy will naturally assume that it’s right and reasonable to put her own needs first in every circumstance, no matter what. She will naturally seek to eliminate all suffering and discomfort through drug-induced oblivion (including a fake drug, Infirmiterol--fake drug names are another literary micro-trend).

Despite a character’s tragic death, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends on a hopeful note; and not a moment too soon. It ended just when I thought I couldn’t bear to read another word.

*****
It’s Christmas time and for my next book, I thought about re-reading Little Women or David Copperfield or Anne of Green Gables or any of a number of my favorite novels. I don’t have Ambien or nembutal or trazodone or Infirmeterol. I hibernate by re-reading books and re-watching movies. But I started something new instead. Maybe I’ll write a review.