Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation: a study in minimalism of plot and character

I bought this book on a whim, mostly because I wanted a lighter read than what I had on my bookshelves, and also because I was intrigued by the cover art. I assigned an excerpt from Moshfegh’s novel to my college creative writing class, and many of them seemed eager to read it and happy to have encountered it on the syllabus. I must confess that I myself have found the whole experience of reading this book confusing and irritating. I didn’t enjoy what I was reading, the storyworld that I was inhabiting, or the characters I got to know. My opinion, it seems, is completely out of sync with the glowing reviews from articles like this one, in The New Yorker, and when that happens, you tend to wonder - am I just missing something, here? Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from My Year of Rest and Relaxation?

“I took a cab home, filled the new pre-scriptions and refilled the old ones at Rite Aid, bought a pack of Skittles, and went home and ate the Skittles and a few leftover primidone and went back to sleep.”

Spoiler alert! I’m going to be giving away the ending. Right now. Reva dies in one of the felled Twin Towers. The rest of the narrative leading up to that final page is occupied by the daily minutiae of the unnamed narrator’s year of deliberately doing nothing, in a privileged, mopey, purposefully obtuse kind of way. Reva is the narrator’s best friend, a superficial but seemingly more vulnerable young woman, who may or may not be trying to help her friend get out of her own head. The parents of these two young adult main characters all get killed off—some as backstory, and one in a minor subplot. Oh and there’s a hare-brained psychiatrist (“daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats”), whom I imagine as a sort of cartoon character since she is so implausible.

Regarding storyline. I was already of the opinion that a book need not be a plot-heavy or plot-twisty to sustain a reader’s interest. I had thought it required interesting characters in relationships. Moshfegh is apparently experimenting with the limits of plot and character minimalism here, perhaps to play with, and on, one of the novel’s main subjects: meaninglessness. It’s true that so little happens and moreover so little is actually thought about that by the time I reached the last page, the collapse of the twin towers and the death of Reva hit me with considerable force. This last-minute event also caused me to rethink the previous 288 pages and wonder: had they truly been that vapid and superficial and unredeemable? My Year of Rest and Relaxation also inspired me to consider how real-world events impact the reader’s relationship and feelings about characters.

I was pleasantly surprised, in fact, at the level to which my interest remained engaged in the book. I still don’t quite understand why. I can’t rule out that it had to do with anticipating having to teach on it, and to write this article. I also felt a certain level of incredulity, as a writer, that Moshfegh felt entitled to take up so much of my time as a reader with navel-gazing, shallow characters, and that incredulity motivated me to keep going. While my students seem to find the unnamed narrator “relatable” and “likeable”, I did not. Occasionally I wanted to slap her in the face and tell her to grow up, though most of the time felt like it wasn’t worth doing either. I know that says as much about me as it does about her; maybe I’m too old for cool cat irony.

So what would it be like to write a novel in which nothing happened? Would that be difficult? Liberating? Pointless? Arty? What would it be like to live a life in which nothing happened, and there was no point to it? What makes a life hold meaning and purpose, and does that depend on how you die? For all my irritation at spending time with these vain characters and their incontrovertible privilege, I applaud Moshfegh’s novel for provoking these questions. If you are already a literary media darling you might well risk boring and frustrating your readers in order to pursue the nature of oblivion, and that that too will come off as brilliant.