My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Novel · 289 pages · Paperback · Published 2019 · Penguin Books

Conscious life happens to other people

By the time Ottessa Moshfegh's narrator commits to a year of pharmaceutically managed sleep, she has already moved through grief, friendship and employment without being altered by any of them.

Young, recently orphaned and working at a Manhattan gallery she finds contemptible, the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation decides sleep can destroy the person she is and return her as someone new. Before the four-month lock-in, before Ping Xi becomes her jailkeeper, the novel has already assembled the system that will sustain the year: Reva's anxious loyalty, her parents' deaths, Dr Tuttle's prescriptions and the fashionable vacancy of Ducat. The sleep year does not interrupt her life. It gives its existing logic a procedure.

The sleep year does not produce a new voice. Moshfegh keeps the narration cold, flat and contemptuous before the project and inside it. Sentence by sentence, the anonymous narrator catalogues rather than feels: pills, clothes, food, Reva, Trevor, Dr Tuttle, the gallery. Reading her is like watching someone describe a fire as a change in temperature. The book is told after the fact, but it does not sound like a confession or a recovery narrative. The surviving narrator speaks in the same register as the woman who wanted to disappear. That sameness is the evidence.

The sleep project has a methodology. There are prescriptions to manipulate, dosages to escalate, a doctor whose negligence functions as infrastructure and a jailkeeper compensated with access to an unconscious body. Dr Tuttle supplies the negligence. The narrator supplies the deception. Every emotional demand the novel raises gets processed through the same mechanism: how much does it cost, how long will it take, what is the dosage.

The ex-boyfriend, Trevor, belongs to the same apparatus. He is the residue of sexual humiliation, the injury the body keeps returning to after the mind has already judged him worthless. She despises him, sees through him and returns to him anyway. If Reva is the friendship the sleep project has no procedure for, Trevor is the desire it tries to sedate. Her contempt for him never cancels the fact that he has had access to her.

Reva resists this processing. Her grief is sentimental, repetitive and embarrassing. It reaches outward. The narrator observes Reva the way she observes everything: with disdain that functions as a defence against feeling the same things. Across the novel, Moshfegh trains the reader to find Reva pathetic and then makes her the most alive person in the book. Their last meeting, in August, is the only scene where the narrator says "I love you" and means it, at the moment the friendship has passed beyond repair. Reva is the only person who will not accept that the narrator is already gone.

The year of sleep ends in June. Three months later the Twin Towers fall.

The ending is not about grief. Moshfegh is careful about this. The narrator does not watch the footage because Reva is in it, though she thinks she sees her. She watches because a woman falling from the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower strikes her as beautiful. The woman is wide awake.

The programme partly worked. She came out in June quieter, capable of natural sleep and briefly able to look at things without immediate contempt. But "wide awake" names what she spent twelve months trying to destroy, and she can find it only in someone else's death, mediated by a VCR, played on loop for emotional management. Absent, watching, mediated: the year returns her to the condition she began in, with one difference. Now she has confirmation that wakefulness existed, briefly, in someone else.

In Eileen, Lapvona and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh returns to punishment as a system people inhabit before they understand it. Eileen makes punishment look like escape. Lapvona turns punishment into cosmology. My Year makes punishment self-administered, applied with methodological rigour, and ending in the proof, watched on loop, that the narrator was right: conscious life happens to other people.