In Ottessa Moshfegh’s third novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” we meet a protagonist so detached from life that her solution is to simply opt out of consciousness altogether. Set in New York City at the turn of the millennium, this darkly satirical novel asks a provocative question: What if the most reasonable response to modern alienation is to sleep it all away?
Our unnamed narrator is young, beautiful, and privileged—a recent Columbia art history graduate with a rent-free Upper East Side apartment funded by her deceased parents’ inheritance. Yet beneath this veneer of success lies a profound emptiness that she seeks to escape through pharmaceutical oblivion. Her mission: to hibernate for an entire year, emerging refreshed and reborn, cleansed of her past traumas and ready to truly live.
The Seductive Pull of Nothingness
Moshfegh’s prose is sharp, clinical, and deceptively straightforward. Through her emotionally barren protagonist, she crafts sentences that cut to the bone. This sparse yet evocative style permeates the novel, creating a narrative both numbing and compelling—much like the cocktail of medications the protagonist consumes. The writing mirrors her psychological state: detached yet penetrating, hollow yet self-aware. When she observes that “Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out,” we understand that beneath her surface nihilism lies a desperate yearning for transformation.
What makes the novel remarkably effective is how Moshfegh baits us with what seems like a simple premise—woman sleeps for a year—and then uses this framework to explore profound questions about trauma, capitalism, art, friendship, and what constitutes a meaningful existence.
Characters as Mirrors and Contrasts
The novel’s supporting characters serve as effective foils to our somnolent narrator:
- Reva – The protagonist’s “best friend” and primary human contact, whom she simultaneously needs and despises. Reva’s superficiality, bulimia, and desperate conventionality initially seem pathetic, yet her earnest engagement with life (however flawed) ultimately challenges the narrator’s complete withdrawal.
- Dr. Tuttle – A comically incompetent psychiatrist who prescribes medications with reckless abandon. Her bizarre non sequiturs and questionable medical ethics make her one of literature’s most memorably terrible doctors.
- Trevor – The emotionally unavailable ex-boyfriend who treats the narrator as a sexual convenience, exemplifying the hollow relationships she’s attempting to escape.
- Ping Xi – The opportunistic artist who agrees to serve as the narrator’s caretaker during her extended chemical hibernation, using her unconscious body as artistic material.
These characters collectively illustrate different responses to modern alienation—Reva through desperate conformity, Trevor through emotional detachment, Ping Xi through exploitative art—while our narrator chooses complete disengagement.
Strengths: Beyond the Shock Value
At its strongest, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” transcends its seemingly gimmicky premise to deliver genuine insights about grief, privilege, and the search for meaning. Moshfegh’s skill is evident in how she balances the narrator’s cold detachment with occasional glimpses of vulnerability:
“I had started ‘hibernating’ as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds.”
The novel also offers a scathing critique of the pharmaceutical industry, the art world, and late-stage capitalism. The protagonist’s extreme solution becomes a perversely logical response to a society that offers medical solutions to spiritual problems and values performance over authentic existence.
The dark humor running throughout prevents the narrative from collapsing under its own nihilistic weight. When the narrator explains that she hopes her year of chemical sleep will allow her to “disappear completely, then reappear in some new form,” we’re confronted with both the absurdity and the poignancy of her ambition.
Weaknesses: The Limits of Detachment
Despite its strengths, the novel’s limitations become more apparent as it progresses:
- Emotional Flatness: While the narrator’s affectless voice is thematically appropriate, it creates a persistent distance that can make it difficult to remain invested in her journey.
- Repetitive Middle Section: The hibernation segments sometimes drag, creating a structural lull that mirrors the protagonist’s stasis but risks losing reader engagement.
- Privilege Without Perspective: The narrator’s wealth-enabled hibernation lacks critical self-awareness about how her privilege makes her extreme solution possible, a blind spot that weakens the novel’s social commentary.
- Uneven Character Development: Secondary characters occasionally feel like caricatures rather than fully realized people, particularly Dr. Tuttle, whose comic absurdity sometimes overshadows her function in the narrative.
The protagonist’s casual cruelty toward Reva and others is meant to be provocative, but it can feel gratuitous rather than revelatory at times. When she takes an Infermiterol pill from her psychiatrist and gives one to Reva without warning her of its effects, the moment crosses from dark comedy into something more troubling.
Moshfegh’s Evolution as a Writer
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” represents an evolution in Moshfegh’s literary preoccupations. Readers familiar with her earlier work—the Hemingway Award-winning “Eileen” or her short story collection “Homesick for Another World“—will recognize her fascination with social outsiders and bodily disgust, but with a more refined execution.
Where “Eileen” gave us a protagonist trapped in squalor and self-loathing, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” offers one who has all external advantages yet still feels fundamentally alienated. Both novels feature women attempting radical escapes from unsatisfying lives, but the shift from external to internal imprisonment marks a deepening of Moshfegh’s thematic concerns.
The novel’s ending—with its unexpected connection to the September 11 attacks—provides a jarring historical context that throws the protagonist’s personal hibernation into sharp relief against real-world tragedy. This juxtaposition of individual and collective trauma creates a powerful, if somewhat manipulative, conclusion.
Contemporary Resonance
Published in 2018, the novel’s exploration of voluntary withdrawal from society feels eerily prescient of our pandemic-era experiences with isolation and disengagement. The protagonist’s reasoning that “sleep felt productive” speaks to our contemporary burnout culture and the sometimes desperate measures people take to escape it.
Readers who appreciate the alienated narrators of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” Halle Butler’s “The New Me,” or Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman” will find familiar territory here, though Moshfegh pushes her protagonist’s disengagement to more extreme lengths.
Final Assessment
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is neither a perfect novel nor an easy one to love, but it is undeniably memorable. Its flaws—the occasional meandering, the sometimes-hollow provocations—are largely inseparable from its ambitions.
At its core, this is a novel about whether emptiness can be overcome through further emptiness—whether one can sleep away the past and wake into a new life. That the answer isn’t entirely clear is both the novel’s limitation and its strength.
Strengths:
- Razor-sharp prose and darkly comic sensibility
- Unflinching exploration of alienation and grief
- Memorable, if unsettling, premise
- Powerful critique of pharmaceutical culture
Weaknesses:
- Emotionally distant protagonist limits reader connection
- Middle section becomes repetitive
- Privileged perspective sometimes lacks self-awareness
- Secondary characters occasionally verge on caricature
Moshfegh has created a distinctive addition to the literature of alienation—one that will repel as many readers as it mesmerizes. For those willing to follow her into the darkest corners of modern disaffection, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” offers a provocative, unsettling, and occasionally profound experience. Like the Infermiterol that propels much of the plot, this novel may induce a kind of blackout state from which you emerge changed, though not necessarily in the ways you expected.