coming from Reva, and our main character embodies everything she wants to be.

We see hints of eating disorders, wanting to be rich, etc. The other character worthy of a name is Reva, her best friend from Columbia. She seemingly is desperately in love with him, but he ditches her again and again for other girls but comes back when she pleads for him. She is hung up over a man named Trevor, who is about ten years old than her, in a cushy job at the Twin Towers, and he has sex with basically a lot of girls, including our narrator. Maybe that’s why the only other characters in the novel don’t actually like her they like the concept of her. Our main character is too perfect, minus the habit of mixing drugs to get an eternal sleep and her dead family. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility what could be so terribly wrong? But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.

Year of rest and relaxation