A few days ago, I finished the second term of my master’s and immediately went to the airport for a flight to Madrid, where I have an international elective on project finance coming up. I had a few books in my bag already, but at the airport I decided to pick up Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation because I thought it was appropriate given the state I was in – especially after several exams on topics I barely understood and came to realise I did not in any way like. The elective starts tomorrow, so I have had a slightly extended weekend to attempt a bit of rest and relaxation myself. Part of that was the Prado, part of that was Moshfegh’s book.
Moshfegh’s book has an interesting premise. It’s about a young woman who decides she wants to sleep for a year – “hibernate” – so that at the end of it she might emerge fresh and ready to face the world. With the help of a psychiatrist who is more than happy to prescribe a vast array of pills, she is set up to have a serious attempt at achieving her goal. Some of the drugs, I was a little disappointed to learn, were made up. In particular, there is no such thing as infermiterol, the drug that lets the narrator lose consciousness in three-day bursts.
There are various reasons why someone may want to sleep for a year. Here, the narrator has had an unfulfilling, largely abusive relationship with an older fund manager. She also has an unsatisfying relationship with her only friend, Reva, a girl who is determined to rise in the world of New York and does not seem to realise the falseness and baseness of the life she leads to try to manage it. The narrator’s parents are both recently dead, one to suicide. She works in a contemporary art gallery, surrounded by people who offer very little to art and whose individuality is all copy pasted. These are all reasons to want to sleep for a while, though we may assess how compelling they are differently. She has had a privileged upbringing at a nice private school, owns a nice flat in Manhattan thanks to her inheritance, and is very pretty. So perhaps she feels guilty about that too.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, we may surmise, is a book about depression. It’s a fairly funny book, but a very negative, very critical one. Readers of this blog will have noticed that I am not a big reader of contemporary fiction, but I cannot help but find My Year of R&R sufficiently repetitive if not all the same. Being critical of the world that surrounds us is very easy. I think it comes naturally to most of us who keep our eyes open, though our criticisms will vary according to our temperaments. At least for young people like the narrator and Moshfegh (who both went to Columbia University) who have been to half-decent universities, the critical theory just floats in the air like smog as you walk around, regardless of what you think of it.
Sally Rooney’s novels, or even something older like White Noise or anything by Jonathan Franzen or what have you, all tell us the same things. After a point, the criticisms are uninteresting and just pass us by, numbing us to any social mission the author may have had. Look at how dependent the average American (youth) is on antidepressants and drugs. Look at how ridiculous and empty and misleading the media is. All of this irony just makes me think of David Foster Wallace’s essay on Dostoevsky, which, whatever faults he had as a writer and a person (and he’s namedropped in the novel critically), is a far more earnest and truer piece of work than My Year of Rest and Relaxation is. I don’t want to say that the novel isn’t funny. It’s just that funniness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Or certainly not when you’re depressed. The narrator is not a particularly good person. I certainly didn’t care about her. She was amusing enough to follow through the book, but that’s about it. Depression is, as readers will no doubt know, a pretty awful thing to go through. I generally spend about a quarter of each month experiencing the vortex that drags me down from the world into emptiness, loneliness, and despair. I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t mind, from time to time, the ability to avoid existing for a while – not for a year, but maybe for a couple of days. Thankfully, I am not one for drugs or alcohol abuse, but I numb myself with videogames during my worst moments and they too make me eventually wake up and return to myself like out of a drug-induced swoon, unable to believe that so much time has passed, just drifted away, and all I have for it is a bad temper and a headache.
David Foster Wallace in that essay of his described our culture as one of “congenial scepticism”, where writers hold “an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions,” forcing them “either [to] make jokes of profound issues or else try somehow to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition.” That is certainly true of much of the modern fiction that I have read. And yet depression is serious stuff. At its worst, it is a constant teetering between life and death. Every criticism that the narrator makes of the world is rich in her irony, but it is also an avoidance of the kind of engagement with the problems that may offer a solution. The book needs our narrator to hibernate, but given it attempts to offer us a vision of renewal at the end it’s worth questioning the validity of that vision.
The problem is that My Year of Rest and Relaxation is just another one of those books about privilege. It knows that it is about that. It uses that word. And perhaps because of that, it does not allow itself to say anything serious. If there are people out there with more real problems than a woman in her mid-twenties living off an inheritance, then I get the feeling Moshfegh would feel uncomfortable letting her narrator’s problems seem properly urgent or desperate, a real matter of life and death. They have to be ironized because irony is sanitary. It’s perhaps the only way we can talk about anything at all.
On the flight out to Madrid, I also finished Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which was another book that didn’t do very much for me. There we have a young man who goes off to seek enlightenment and eventually finds it, according to Hesse’s understanding of Buddhism. Both Hesse’s novel, from the early 20th century, and Moshfegh’s, from a few years ago in our own, are in some sense about taking control over our lives and getting some kind of enlightenment and renewal. The only difference is that one attempts to reach this through wandering and spiritual (and other) experiences, and the other attempts to use drugs and sleep to achieve a similar goal. Both works are products of a godless, empty world, but Moshfegh’s is definitely a product of a world still more empty than Hesse’s. What separates them is that I can at least admire Hesse’s go at finding solutions – it was authentic, just a little silly. Moshfegh’s book felt hollow instead.
At the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Reva dies in the events of 9/11, and the narrator finishes her sleep and sells her parents’ house. She has cleansed herself of the world, and I suppose can start living again. The whole thing just feels pointless. The narrator hasn’t changed. She has just had a year off. If I were capable of resting, I’d probably feel the same after a week of lounging about. But we’ve wasted a lot of pages to get a faux epiphany.
Perhaps I am reading the wrong fiction. Perhaps I am a bad reader. I understood the cleverness of the book, I just didn’t care. Which probably says that I am depressed, not that the book is bad. But there just wasn’t anything there. I could give you examples of how the narrator mistreats her friend (she gives her her own drugs) or of the social commentary but, like, whatever, man. The truth is that I am alive, I have to deal with this stupid depressing horrible world every day and try to find things worth believing in and holding on to, and I expect my contemporary fiction to be about that struggle, not about the giving up, that is, if it wishes to deal with this stuff at all. I don’t need success, I just need striving, something to make me put the book down with a little bit more motivation than I had when I picked it up.
If I wanted to feel numb or cold, I could just read about project finance.