My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Review
Have you ever been so dissatisfied with your life that you thought sleeping through it could make everything better? That’s exactly what the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation does when she realizes she is done trying to keep up with the Upper East Side way of life and the sunny dispositions of everyone around her in pre-9/11 New York.
A recent orphan and Columbia graduate, the narrator finds herself working in a hip art gallery, with the support of her substantial inheritance. She has the unrelenting support of her clingy too-old-to-get-rid-of best friend Reva and the assurance that her on-again, off-again, boyfriend Trevor will always come back. She’s intelligent, young, skinny, and strikingly gorgeous. Everyone thinks she should be having the time of her life. But that’s the problem—there is nothing that makes her happy. Well, except maybe her collection of Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford movies on VHS. Stuck in a cycle of monotony, she seeks out a persuadable psychologist and diagnoses herself with severe insomnia. This begins her year long journey through prescription sleeping pills and the sleepwalking they are accompanied by.
Told from a perspective of extreme privilege, the narrator is able to largely recede from the waking world—the weeks and the news flowing by with no consequence to her. Aside from her looks and intelligence, it’s hard to see how anyone could like the narrator, especially Reva who she constantly pushes away and neglects to comfort as her mother is dying. She is intentionally written to be disliked and to make the reader wonder if they were as privileged and as alone and as unhappy, wouldn’t they do the same? But I am not as privileged or rich and both are constantly hovering and clouding the story. The dreamscapes and memory loss, the memories of her distant parents, her hipster boyfriend and Kate Moss-obsessed best friend all add depth and comedy to this dislikable protagonist and accompanied with Ottessa’s writing style, nearly redeem the rest of the tale. I had to settle on a 3/5 star rating on this one and can’t help but think that this dreamy, ridiculous novel would have made for an incredible short story.
