My Year of Rest and Relaxation

One of the best novels I have read for a while simply for its verve, its audacity and that laugh-out-loud quality; one has to marvel what must go on in Moshfegh’s mind to create scenes of such grotesque comic depravity. Many others struggled with the idea of an quite explicit feminine anti-hero, but this is to miss the point. If there are antecedents for My Year, then the two that came to my mind were Plath’s Bell Jar and Bret Easton-Ellis’ American Psycho. While these classics may not have much in common, My Year captures both incipient madness and the absurdities of late capitalism/consumerism. The lack of scruples exhibited by the narrator is just what makes her so compelling. Do not think of the people as characters; more as caricatures. Moshfegh’s dark world should almost be seen as a satire; on New York privilege, the art world, the institutionalisation of medical practice and — most broadly — on the need to conform or be ‘normal’ and ‘accepted’. There is much cannon fodder here for literary critics. Moshfegh’s writing is superb too (see esp. p.274–6: the description of the narrator’s last sleep). Credit to Moshfegh that I ordered her first novel immediately on finishing this. 10/10.

By Ottessa Moshfegh