Her solution is to put herself into chemical hibernation for a year. In Moshfegh’s new novel, “ My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the unnamed narrator-a young, tall, thin, blond, beautiful woman whose physical appearance functions as a near-comic disguise for her laziness, uselessness, and misanthropy-can hardly stand to be conscious. If they kill the wrong person, the plan, obviously, will fail.
The only way to return to the better place is for each of them to kill the right person. In “A Better Place,” a story in her 2017 collection, “ Homesick for Another World,” the child narrator believes that she and her twin brother were sent to Earth from a different universe. Sometimes Moshfegh’s characters fixate on solutions-ones that are designed to match the absurdity of their fishbowl existence but are also delivered seriously, as if they will work. The drunken sailor McGlue, the protagonist of Moshfegh’s 2014 novella of the same name, cocoons himself in his addiction and repeatedly bashes his skull against the wall. Her characters develop methods of simultaneously savoring and blunting their predicaments: the title character of “ Eileen,” Moshfegh’s 2015 novel, swaddles her genitalia in thick undergarments and then compulsively scrabbles at what’s hidden she gobbles laxatives and submits to great, “oceanic” shits. She has a freaky and pure way of accessing existential alienation, as if her mind were tapped directly into the sap of some gnarled, secret tree.
Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible.
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