This 2018 novel has a big following of fans, and I’ve been intending to read it since it was published. I was finally inspired to start reading after it appeared in a list of books enjoyed by readers of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, a novel which I enjoyed enormously.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is set in Manhattan in 2000. The narrator, a receptionist at an art gallery, decides that modern life it just too stressful, and that she’d benefit from a year of hibernation. The recent death of her wealthy parents means that she can survive on her inheritance.

She consults an entertainingly mad psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle, and pretends to be suffering from insomnia to build up a large supply of drugs to assist her hibernation. Her best friend, Reva, is a walking, talking, cheesy self-help book, whose own life is in chaos.

This novel is a satire of social privilege, ‘first world problems’, and capitalist psychiatry. I found it very funny, driven by zinging one-liners.

Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats.

The characters are entirely unlikable and exhaustingly self-centred. Dr Tuttle provides light relief, but I think the novel would have benefited from some sort of moral compass or naive character to ground the insanity. I think Boy Parts was much better-balanced in that regard.

Moshfegh has decided to root the plot in a specific period: George W. Bush’s inauguration appears at one point, for example, and I’m not sure what this is intended to add. Perhaps it was intended to make us reflect on how simple those times seem in retrospect, and heighten the pathos of the narrator’s need to escape from the world—but it seems an odd period to choose, if so.

All things considered, while I enjoyed this book, I thought Boy Parts was a substantially more successful work. It dealt with broader and more pressing societal issues, it was more disturbing, it was funnier, and I felt I took more from it. But perhaps that’s in part because Moshfegh’s novel is American and Clark’s is British, and the local one resonated more with me.

Some other short quotes that I noted down:

Studied grace is not grace.

I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.

My blind eye was the one real comfort I could give her.

My thanks to the Newcastle University library for lending me a copy of this book.