Dr Tuttle, a half-mad croaker in the tradition of William Burroughs, wears a neck brace and a white sleeveless nightgown to work and maintains the half-ironical paranoid patter of a 1960s cartoon psychopomp. Some light relief is provided by the sleeper’s bulimic friend Reva, whose dialogue is scripted from a self-help manual, and by Dr Tuttle, the cartoon psychiatrist whose willingness to prescribe makes the year of recuperation possible. All this is delivered as comic – it is comic – but it’s not exactly funny, though of course we laugh. One of the other pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery. At the height of their relationship Trevor’s idea of mutually rewarding sex was to come in her mouth while she slept – or pretended to. Meanwhile, Trevor, her boyfriend since college, now the ex she can’t stop obsessing about, has spent years wearing her down. All she managed to elicit from either of them was an aggressive vagueness even their deaths were acts of absent-minded rejection. Her mother – “a bedroom drunk” – used Valium to keep her placid as a baby. Why would anyone do this to herself? Because she’s already been made abject and partially erased by everyone she knows. This self-induced coma, powered by prescription psychopharmaceuticals, will be broken only by short intervals of waking, during which she will eat ordered-in pizza and visit the lavatory. Matter of fact, full of bravado yet always wryly observational, these stack up steadily to construct the brisk interior landscape of her third novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation.Ī young New York woman – unnamed, moneyed, a spoiled Wasp by her own account, not long out of higher education and now a receptionist at a gallery where art thinks of itself as subversive but is in fact “just canned counterculture crap” – prepares herself for a year-long sleep. Instead, the sense of immediacy, the sense of being inside a character, the sense of things happening and having psychic value, both to the writer and her reader, is provided by the structure and content of her sentences. O ne of the pleasures of reading Ottessa Moshfegh is that – unusually, these days – she rarely writes in the present tense.
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