Still, the handsome Egyptians who run the corner bodega, having watched her stumble through the door with toothpaste crust on her face one too many times, stopped flirting with her long ago. No shaving.” She’s blonde, thin, and pretty, traits that don’t abandon her however much she neglects cultivating them. In the throes of her “hibernation,” the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (for succinctness’ sake, let’s just call her the sleeper) “stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. They are to conventional femininity what pirates were to 19 th-century mercantilism, and this makes them a blast to read about.
Forget likable, these young women refuse even to be acceptable, and this ushers them into a certain kind of freedom. The bravado in Moshfegh’s comprehensive darkness makes her novels both very funny and weirdly exhilarating, despite her willingness to travel so far down the road of misanthropy that she approaches nihilism. In this swaggeringly mordant novel, set in New York during the 18 months leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the narrator just wants to be unconscious as often as possible, preferably under the influence of enough heavy-duty pharmaceuticals to “arrest my imagination and put me into a deep, boring, inert sleep.” Recently orphaned, she has precisely two personal relationships: with Reva, her alleged best friend, and with Trevor, an older guy in finance-theirs is a degrading on-and-off affair that persists only because Trevor will “periodically deplete his self-esteem in relationships with older women, i.e., women his own age, then return to me to reboot. You’d have to loan her a few fucks to zero out her account. The unnamed narrator of Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, has negative fucks to give. Eileen, a young secretary at a juvenile prison in early 1960s Massachusetts, holds nearly everyone in contempt, a sentiment occasionally modified by her prurient interest in their sex lives.
The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel, 2015’s Eileen, had zero fucks to give.
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