My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)

Once again I have read an entire book and, only when sitting down to write about it, realized that the narrator was never named. I keep falling for this - how do I not realize it while I'm reading?

Our narrator is a beautiful, wealthy young woman. Her parents are both dead and her inheritance will sustain her for a year while she essentially hibernates. She has found a total quack of a doctor (who I think could be a whole book herself) to prescribe lots of drugs for insomnia, including one that causes 3-day blackouts. She emerges from her apartment only to visit the corner bodega for coffee and food. She occasionally sees her best friend Reva, who is pretty loyal given how she is treated by her so-called friend who seems completely uninterested in her. Reva's mother is dying and our narrator responds by being annoyed at Reva's need to talk about it. She's also still in contact with Trevor, a guy she had a relationship with and now is half-heartedly stalking by phone. This is her life: live in squalor, take drugs, sleep, don't care about anyone, don't care about herself, sleep some more.

There's not much of a plot here, which is enough to drive some people away. I get it. Sometimes you need a story, or at least a likable protagonist, and this book contains neither. It's one of those books that everyone seems to either love or hate. I'm in the love camp. This person is just so screwed up, but I can kind of understand the motivation to just step away from the world for a while and get a whole lot of rest for a long time. I was a little jealous at times. Except for the part about the drugs. I'm not a fan, especially of something that will cause you spend three days doing things that are kind of out of character and that you don't remember later. She actually went out clubbing during her hibernation while on these drugs.

I love a good character study, especially when it's about someone on a downward spiral (see also: The Cry of the Sloth, etc.) But Moshfegh's writing style deserves a lot of the credit for my enjoyment of this book too. When not a lot is happening, you need to write about it in a way that will keep the reader's interest and she did that for me. It's hard to say exactly what about it is so good, but I think the dialogue and commentary is just rather colorful and dramatic somehow, and the narrator just has so many unexpected observations and dreams and strange thoughts that she recounts. (I mean here is a person who can't drum up any feelings towards anyone or interest in much of anything, but absolutely loves any movie starring Whoopi Goldberg.) It also doesn't hurt that all the characters are pretty bizarre and screwed up, not just our narrator.

This book is not for everyone. But it was definitely for me.

Eileen

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (2015)

Twenty-four year old Eileen was trapped in a life she didn't want, working at a boys' prison just outside of Boston and living with her deranged alcoholic father. Told from the point of view of herself in her 70s, she reveals what happened in the week leading up to Christmas that finally spurred her to leave her hometown of "X-ville" and start a new life.

The catalyst was a glamorous woman named Rebecca, a new coworker who befriended Eileen right away. Eileen was usually very stand-offish but was drawn to Rebecca right away, and became obsessed with her. When Rebecca drew Eileen into a crime, there was no turning her down.

Although Eileen is a crime novel, a thriller, it's not action-packed, but more of a character study and a slow burn. But it was filled with anticipation of what was to come, with many references to the eventual crime and Eileen's later life once she escapes her home and basically becomes a different person. There was a point at which I got a bit annoyed and thought come on, where is this actually going? But I am impatient and that was a brief feeling. When the crime eventually came, it was pretty great.

But it's more about the character than the crime, and she is super dark. She describes herself in unflattering ways: "I looked like nothing special...I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time." She was constantly punishing herself, denying herself food, comfort, pleasure. Her eating was disordered, she drank too much, she had no friends. She projected a bland exterior, a "death mask" to cover all the negative feelings swirling inside of her. She kept a dead mouse in the glove compartment of her car.

The house she shared with her father was a disgusting mess. Neither of them cleaned and the place was cluttered, dingy, and dirty. Rolls of insulation in her attic bedroom sat for years, an unfinished project her father had abandoned. In 1964, when the story takes place, it was a women's job to keep a tidy house, but Eileen rejects this role, as she rejects much of what is considered appropriate for women at the time. She is suspicious of orderly houses: "Those perfect, neat colonials I'd passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what's wrong with you than any decrepit dump...People truly engaged in life have messy houses." Of course, despite her messy house, Eileen is not engaged with life. At least not until she meets Rebecca and everything changes.

I've been wanting to read this for a while, and picked it up this week because I saw that it takes place in the week leading up to Christmas. (On Christmas Eve as I was reading, I noticed that Christmas Eve that year was also a Thursday, so the timing was especially good.) I first heard about Eileen when I saw the galley on Edelweiss last spring before it came out. I requested the galley but didn't get approved until later when I was wrapped up in reading our Community Read nominations so it sort of fell by the wayside until I was browsing at the library a week or so ago and grabbed this copy.

It hasn't received much attention despite positive reviews, including this one from the New York Times. It doesn't have many ratings on Goodreads, nor has there been much buzz about it. But it will definitely find its way to my Staff Picks shelf, right next to other dark novels like Gillian Flynn's Dark Places and my ever-present favorite, The Cry of the Sloth. If you like dark crime novels that are strongly character-driven, I highly recommend this one.

Winter Bingo is going better than I thought it would. This fulfills the "thriller" square.