My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel, was published in 2018. It’s set in Manhattan in 2000 and 2001, during which its unnamed narrator, a recent Columbia graduate, medicates herself in order to sleep as continuously as possible. Her parents have recently passed, and a job at an art gallery in Chelsea proves not worth keeping; she can live on an inheritance, and on unemployment. Her social life consists of visits from her college friend Reva, and exchanges with the Egyptians at the local bodega. During her other waking hours, she watches television and VHS tapes, anything with Whoopi Goldberg. Her ever changing pill habit, administered by a madcap psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, leads to problems with sleepwalking blackouts, from which she might awake on the couch to several boxes of Chinese takeout, or even on the subway, going somewhere important. In desperation she contacts an unscrupulous artist from her gallery days, Ping Xi, to see about a project he might be interested in which would keep her confined and fed in her apartment with no risk of somnolent excursions into the city. Meanwhile Reva has been transferred by a boss and former lover, and will be working at the World Trade Center…
Moshfegh’s prose is mostly flat and deadpan, but not precise enough for what My Year of Rest and Relaxation is supposed to do, which is to dispense cynical insights, such as: “Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.” This is to change after the passage of concentrated rest under Ping Xi’s care, but her narrator spends most of the novel in critical and judgmental form, registering the “scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats” (more simply “hipster nerds”) on the subway, or Reva’s dress from “a J. Crew catalogue the year before”, or that Ping Xi “wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving”, was in fact an “art-world hack.” The imprecisions are mostly issues of usage and syntax, in some cases observations that miss or read as forced. I’ll start with the sentence level and speak of form before content.
In reviewing the novel for the The New York Times Dwight Garner thought he was reminded of Patrick Bateman by the anti-human qualities of Moshfegh’s anti-heroine, but one suspects it was as much her tendency toward parataxis. The lady of leisure tells us that she drinks her second cup of bodega coffee “while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took Trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again.” Of course it’s the brand names as well that might evoke Bret Easton Ellis; elsewhere the narration, bereft of brands, is more like Hemingway via Cormac McCarthy: “Reva unwrapped it and stuck it in her mouth and flicked the wrapper over her shoulder and chewed and kept on driving.” As in American Psycho, this kind of thing is part of a listing tendency, and it’s not only verbs that can be listed. The narrator usually falls asleep on a sofa “which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.”
Moshfegh has no difficulty writing “and”, then, yet she sometimes elects not to in favor of comma splices. A visit from Reva on Christmas day sees the narrator omitting the conjunction: “I went to the VCR, moved the little elephant statue that I’d positioned to cover the glare from the digital clock.” Then she turns her glare on Reva, noting that “Her mascara was smudged, her face was droopy and swollen and caked with foundation and bronzer.” It’s odd that in exhibit B Moshfegh is actually listing things with “and” again, but relying on the parallelism of “her x was”/”her y was”. Even if the trick is in the parallelism, it’s not clear what governs using versus not using “and” when these are compared to the following sentence, from the same passage: “I leaned against the wall and watched her take her phone out of her purse and turn it off, then open the tin of popcorn, eat some, and put the cover back on.” It’s unfortunate that she didn’t omit the “and” from the cliché that introduces a section of chapter 2, that she didn’t write “September came, went.” (There are other clichés [“steered clear”, “strangely liberating”] but “September came and went”, because it begins a paragraph, offends the most.) When the narrator sees the facade of Reva’s suburban home, she grants herself a vision of the kitchen, and the omission of the last “and” does seem necessary: “I imagined cabinets full of crap, flies flurrying around a wooden bowl of brown bananas, an old refrigerator covered in magnets pinning down expired coupons for toilet paper and dish soap, a pantry packed with cheap store-brand foods.” This looseness corresponds to the movement of the roving imagination, the associating mind of a narrator who can so quickly judge an outfit, or the outside of a house, and think she understands something of the interior beyond.
Sometimes noun phrases are added to simple sentences, usually for additional description. It’s as if they are supposed to appear as subordinate clauses: “I even made myself a cup of chamomile tea, the nauseating sweet smell wafting up from my chipped coffee cup like a hot diaper.” It’s not clear why once comma splices are permissible this could not be written for greater clarity as: “I even made myself a cup of chamomile tea, the nauseating sweet smell wafting up from my chipped coffee cup was like a hot diaper.” As it is, it sounds as if hot diapers are known to waft up from chipped coffee cups, as much as as if the “nauseating sweet smell” is like a hot diaper. Maybe it’s frustration with Reva that brings the narrator nearest to despair and incoherence. The following might work as spoken word but is not the sort of thing one wants to read: “Reva was quiet for a while, cold white puffs of air rising up off her tongue as she licked the long plastic spoon.”
But ambiguous syntax can sometimes be effective. There are some longer and again descriptive sentences whose parts relate in more complex ways because the lines of subordination cannot be drawn. Early in her attempt at hibernation, the narrator has a lot of dreams about her parents, and while awake, memories such as this:
There were moments when I was little, my mother could make me feel very special, stroking my hair, her perfume sweet and light, her pale, bony hands cool and jangling with gold bracelets, her frost hair, her lipstick, breath woody with smoke and stringent from booze.
The sentence has simply lapsed into a series of noun phrases, such that the associated pairs (“cool”/”frost”, “breath”/”smoke”, “booze”/”woody”) and the disjunctive pair of “woody” and “stringent” interact more freely. And in the following, Moshfegh uses a series of three predicates unconnected by any conjunction, with another of those noun phrases attached to the last:
I passed a twitching, sweater-clad Pomeranian and its nanny on the corner, watched it lift its leg and piss on a flat, glassy pane of ice on the pavement, heard the singe of the hot stuff melting through, steam spreading in a contained bubble for a moment, then dissipating.”
The sentence has the momentum necessary to sustain itself across non-grammatical commas through consonance, an old-fashioned trick. Coherence, without grammatical grounding, swings from “singe” to “stuff” to “steam spreading” to “dissipating”, so that we can hear the pissing dog even as the narrator walks on down the sidewalk.
The more frustrating imprecisions in My Year of Rest and Relaxation invite the question as to what Moshfegh is trying to say, particularly when her narrator is really reaching for a withering judgement. Reva, she writes, “was obsessed with brand names, conformity, “fitting in””. It seems improbable that Reva declares her own intention of “fitting in”, so we are left to wonder who is being quoted. The conformist urge is already under examination here. Is the very cliché “fitting in” also to be questioned? Elsewhere Moshfegh has left clichés unquoted. That early complaint about “hipster nerds” in comparison with the narrator’s boyfriend Trevor, which is two pages long, has a bizarre conclusion, not deliberately so as far as I can understand it. The tropes attached to these dubious men are recognizable from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and the occasional stand-up comic (David Foster Wallace is mentioned), but the narrator’s disgust is apparently much deeper:
So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui”. It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.
The quotation marks around “abstract ideas” and “existential ennui” are believable; Moshfegh or her narrator might actually be quoting someone on those. It’s the last thought which seems at best like a revision of something stronger. What does she mean, it was easy to imagine? That she did, or did often? What would the reader expect to make such a thing difficult, especially for one so un-squeamish as this narrator? These are apparently the particular celebrity crushes that complement the liberal arts degrees and the “navy blue peacoats or army green parkas”, and it seems that Moshfegh had more to say on that particular phenomenon than that it was easy for her narrator to imagine it.
It’s not that the narrator is supposed to be right about everything—she’s awful cynical and really does need some rest and relaxation—but it’s a disappointment when her observations turned into speculations are delivered without keen and careful placement, or as above, when the speculation has no confidence and is acknowledged as such. It’s the more confident vision, without so much resemblance to cultural commentary, which produces the best moments in the novel. That clothed Pomeranian on a walk with the nanny in the Upper West Side might be part of a trope, but when it marks its territory, it gets to be something else.