A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman's experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn't just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate - dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 - this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America's major young writers working at the height of her powers.
***
[WHENEVER I WOKE up, night or day, I'd shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed] ***(Jonathan Cape, 12 July 2018 ebook, 304 pages, review copy from publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
***
***
I really, really loved this book. I thought Eileen was great but My Year of Rest and Relaxation is even better. I was sucked into the narrator's life. I loved her voice, dark though it was, dark and addictive. I thought the cover was amazing. This book like Eileen is not an easy read. Moshfegh writes about the dark shit that other writers shy from and try to gloss over. There's no gloss here, only raw, painful reality. The characters are great in this book. The narrator's tells the story and her voice is fantastic. Dr Tuttle is such a terrible psychiatrist, enabling the narrator's pill-popping she becomes almost funny. Reva, her so-called best friend is insufferable as well, always trying too hard. She's a comic genius. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a brilliant character-study. I've never read anything quite like it. Nice characters are dull and boring. I've got a thing for dark ladies. This book is stunning.
