Young women, invisible even to themselves: My Year of Rest and Relaxation & Pretend I’m Dead

I’m rounding off my reading year with reviews of American novels about women in their mid-20s who are estranged from everything, even themselves. While the first owns two properties and the second cleans other people’s houses for a living, they are equally desperately homeless inside. While the first namedrops designer labels, and the second cleaning products, both bring a light touch to the tragedy of feeling invisible and being insecurely attached.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

At twenty-five, the unnamed narrator seems to have it all: slender and attractive, she has an art history degree from Columbia University, a job in an avant-garde gallery, and owns her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan as well as the childhood home she now rents out. But her parents died within weeks of each other when she was still at college, and barely noticed her when they were alive, she despises her only friend and she’s in an on-off relationship with a sexually abusive older man. No wonder all she wants to do is sleep.
 
And sleep she does, thanks to a crazy psychiatrist who’s particularly profligate with her prescription pad and to a stack of mind-numbing movies she watches on VCR. VCR? Yes, it’s the year 2000 and the reader knows where New York is heading, even if the narrator doesn’t.
 
Several of the medications she ingests are recognisable, although it’s “Infermiterol” that proves the most disturbing, inducing three-day blackouts, albeit without her coming to any significant harm. All in all, her year of rest and relaxation seems to work. But the final chapter, a single page based around an event that has been heavily foreshadowed, invites the reader to reassess the project, particularly in its enigmatic concluding sentence. What does the anti-heroine’s sleep represent?
 
Having missed out on Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker-prize-shortlisted Eileen, I was keen to sample her second novel and fourth book. It’s testament to the quality of the author’s prose – stylishly matter-of-fact – that the story of a woman devoted to sleep kept me turning the page. But I’m not sure what I made of it overall: rather than “blackly funny” and “compassionate” as promised by the blurb, I found it desperately sad. Are all rich young women so vacuous? Thanks to Jonathan Cape for my review copy.

Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin

Almost twenty-four, Mona has given up on college and cleans houses for a living. Volunteering at a needle-exchange scheme, she meets an older man she calls Mr Disgusting. But, unappealing as his false teeth, flaccid penis and heroin addiction might be, he feels right for her. So when he exits her life, and his, she enacts his earlier suggestion she up sticks to Taos, New Mexico, despite having no connections there.
 
She encounters a community even weirder than she is: the Anglo-Japanese couple devoted to sunsets; the divorced father with a photographic shine to his pre-teen daughter; the woman with a three-month waiting list for her psychic readings. Through them, through the photographs she takes of herself in her clients’ houses and through all that’s missing in her occasional phone calls to her father, Mona confronts her abusive childhood and is gradually able to become visible to herself.
 
Jen Beagin’s debut novel is a poignant and quirky portrait of a young woman’s journey to selfhood. The voice is entertaining and engaging and the ending offers hope of redemption without false promises of happy-ever-afters. Thanks to UK publishers Oneworld for my review copy.

These young women’s predicament echoes that of Emily in “No Hard Feelings”, one of the stories in my recently-published collection on the theme of identity, Becoming Someone.

Mona’s use of her camera as a tool to reconnect with herself is reminiscent of Dougie in “Habeas Corpus”. You can hear me read the opening here --------- >

Although I haven’t been consciously pushing to finish the year on a nice round number of books consumed (rather than 147 which doesn’t even have the virtue of being a prime), I have read more books this month than most. And reviewed all but the short story anthology, so apologies if you’ve felt overwhelmed. Tap or click on the image for the 15 reviews I’ve posted this month, featuring love’s challenges; a message from the past; friends reunited; beneath the surface calm; families in crisis; in ancient times; hunger, madness and incarceration; and today’s theme of young women invisible even to themselves.

Of these, 80% are from independent publishers; 67% from female authors; and 27% for both BME authors and translations, hitting all the reading targets I set myself earlier this year. I also selected three novels to join my favourites of 2018 (Nothing but Dust; And the Wind Sees All and Dark Water).

I don’t think I’ll be boring you with all these stats next year, but I will be back later this week with my grand (or grandiose?) review of my reading year.