PicoBlog

The great pandemic novel was published two years before the pandemic. (That’s nothing: the great pandemic movie hit screens in 1993.) It was written by Ottessa Moshfegh and its nameless narrator decides to hibernate for just one year. Unlike those under lockdown, she isolates by choice: “My hibernation was self-preservational,” she reports. “I thought that it was going to save my life.”

But her account of its monotony is resonant as well as darkly comic:

Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth. But that was all that went on. And I might have just dreamt up the scum.

This was our dream, too.

Why does Moshfegh’s narrator retreat from life? We never really learn. Her parents recently died and she is in the process of selling their house; she is aimless and cynical. But her response seems disproportionate. She enlists her risibly negligent psychiatrist in a plot to cocoon herself—aiming for “a great transformation”—through a year of sleep induced by a concoction of real and fictional drugs: Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, Silencior, Seconol, Nembutal, Valium, Librium, Placydil, Noctec, Miltown, Infermiterol.

Reviewers admired the book but found the narrative bleak and the narrator “unlikeable“—a glib, irrational narcissist. I’m not sure what it says about me that I didn’t react this way. I never disliked the narrator: I was rooting for her. (It is my failure as a critic that I cannot justify this response by reference to the text, but it would surprise me if I were alone.)

Nor does it seem quite right to call the novel bleak. You could read it as a critique of self-care and the pharmaceutical industry, of capitalist consumption and the commodification of time (the subject of a brilliant book by Jonathan Crary: 24/7). But you have to reckon with the fact that hibernation works—at the least by the narrator’s account. With the help of Infermiterol and a pompous conceptual artist, she says goodbye to her ex-friend, Reva, and enters limbo; but she doesn’t kill herself or sleep forever. Instead, she wakes into new life:

I breathed and walked and sat on a bench and watched a bee circle the heads of a flock of passing teenagers. There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now. I could survive without the house. I understood that it would soon be someone else’s store of memories, and that was beautiful. I could move on.

I’m not saying we can read this straight. It’s followed by a final chapter, one page long, in which the narrator watches footage of a woman who resembles Reva jumping to her death on 9/11 and treats it, obscenely, as a metonym for existential freedom: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”

We are left flailing, too. I don’t think one can read the book as satire. I don’t believe it is a twisted fairytale. Instead, it frustrates all attempts to say what it says. That checking out by hibernation is a bad idea? Well, duh. That it can be a form of social protest? Not exactly. That the pursuit of nothing but contentment is insane? Or that it isn’t? (“If you knew what would make you happy, wouldn’t you do it?” the narrator asks.) That an unethical complicity is required of those who carry on?

No. What I love about My Year of Rest and Relaxation is that it refuses both assurance and advice. It does not tell us it will all be fine or what we should do to make things better. Instead it acknowledges with compassion and brutal honesty—compassion even for the narrator’s lack of it—the desire to take a break from reality, to sleep for a year, and to awake transformed, in another world.

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