![]() She becomes so wasteful - disposing of time, money, and resources - that her pampered lack of need becomes disgracefully apparent. Hers is a decline into numb carelessness. On the one hand, who among us hasn’t wanted to sleep all day or at least voiced the desire to live an easier life? But the descent of Moshfegh’s narrator is more than that. The combination of these characteristics alone might be enough to irk some readers, but her ability to live off her parents’ money and social services while squandering her education and potential pushes her straight over the top. Not only is the narrator classically good-looking, like an “off-duty model,” as she puts it, but she was educated at an Ivy League school. Either way, this lack of interest in her own backstory presents a clever sleight of hand: the reader must take the narrator at her surface-level privilege, forcing her to be so unlikable and unrelatable that Moshfegh renders her as a clever satire of the upper class. While her parents did die while she was in college, Moshfegh spends little page time on the narrator’s relationship with them or her feelings for them, instead using their deaths as a way to explain how the narrator can afford to go into hibernation while the rest of the country (even in the novel’s early-2000s setting) labors to eke out an existence from paycheck to paycheck. It’s possible that the narrator experienced something to require this time on the mend. Why does the narrator need a whole year of rest and relaxation? But what she is healing herself of is a question that hangs over the novel. She becomes addicted to antidepressants and tranquilizers on purpose and withdraws into the squalid shell of her Upper East Side apartment in an effort, she claims, to heal herself. ![]() Maybe a certain amount of solitude is a necessary part of modern life, but the affluent, unnamed narrator in Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, takes seeking solitude to a destructive extreme. ![]() ![]() Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women. ![]()
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