Pills for a Purpose

photo: penguinrandomhouse.com

There are weekends when I don't leave my apartment. Not a single toe steps out the door. And I'm perfectly fine with that. But a whole year of staying inside? I'd probably go crazy.

The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation might be called crazy by those around her, but her retreat is intentional, existential, necessary in order for her to relearn how to live in the world. Of course, she's aided by a variety of prescription and over-the-counter medications, ranging from melatonin pills, NyQuil, and Advil to Xanax, Ambien, Vicodin, Infermiterol, and countless others.

Her pill cocktail is carefully crafted to keep her asleep as long as possible. Young, blonde, and beautiful, she was fired from her job for excessive sleeping. But the inheritance from her dead parents keeps her more than well off. She doesn't have to worry about anything other than sleeping, and her "best," and only friend, Reva coming over unannounced.

Reva is a daily source of annoyance and rare bursts of affection. Reva is shallow, cares about designer brands and being skinny, things that the narrator disdains only because she has both money and a waif figure. Reva constantly babbles about her affair with her boss and her mother who's dying of cancer, while the narrator just wants to be alone. She rarely listens. She is, in fact, a terrible friend.

But she's tired of the world. So she keeps herself in a drug-induced haze, trying to stave off thoughts of her on-off boyfriend Trevor and the dead parents that she lost one after the other.

As the narrator's tolerance to her various drugs builds, she devises a final plan. She won't leave her apartment for four months, living in a fully drug-induced state. At the end of those four months, she's hoping to be "reborn," rejuvenated, awake, finally ready to fully live.

---

I thought, due to the subject nature of this novel, that the prose was going to be more deliberately existential, more plodding. To my happy surprise, this wasn't the case. Moshfegh's writing is easy to read, straight and honest, and the narrator's voice is compelling, sometimes absurd and humorous, sometimes wrenching. The narrator isn't someone you'd want to be friends with, but she has an overwhelmingly tender quality to her, too.

The only thing I am still unsure about is the ending. Halfway through the novel, I knew that Moshfegh was going to bring in 9/11 somewhere. She did. And yes, it parallels the narrator's destruction and then awakening, but it almost felt like 9/11 became a literary tool (I mean, it has), an event to conclude on that's just too easy. Despite this, the ending beautifully frames the rest of the novel.

In conclusion, I'm still conflicted, but the novel as a whole was, for a novel about apathy and depression and life in NYC, quite fun.

7/10 📕