![]() Watching Moshfegh turn her withering attention to the gleaming absurdities of pre-9/11 New York City, an environment where everyone except the narrator seems beset with delusional optimism, horrifically carefree, feels like eating bright, slick candy-candy that might also poison you. Our staff and contributors share their cultural enthusiasms. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness-because they impair our judgment. Tuttle, a Yellow Pages quack extraordinaire whose medical advice runs the gamut from “dial 9-1-1 if anything bad happens” to “use reason when you feel you can.” Tuttle enters the picture while wearing a neck brace and holding a cat that she calls “my eldest.” She tells the narrator, “People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. Good strong American sleep.” She believes that if she can stay in this pharmaceutical chrysalis for long enough, she will emerge transformed-a person who lives in the world instead of constantly fantasizing about removing herself from it. “Three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien” is a “nice melange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness,” especially with some trazodone on top, “so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground . . . and maybe one more Ativan,” to add a “cool breeze, slightly effervescent . . . My mouth watered. But she savors the nuances of unconsciousness, mixing pills in sequence like a d.j. She is incapable of carrying on conversations, even with her best friend, Reva. I’m going to bed.”Īs an adult, the narrator-relatably enough-is passionate only about sleeping. “None of us had much warmth in our hearts,” she thinks, remembering her dad, a snide and distant professor, and her mom, a vain alcoholic who said, after announcing that her father had cancer, “Well, Goddamnit, if you insist on getting weepy . . . You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle? You had colic and cried for hours and hours, inconsolable and for no good reason. (A few of these drugs are invented, as is Infermiterol, a substance that induces three-day blackouts, during which the narrator’s personality blossoms and fades.) She comes up with her unconventional wellness plan in the fog of detachment that follows the death of her parents, which seems not much different from the fog of detachment that preceded it. “Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, Silencior, Seconol, Nembutal, Valium, Librium, Placydil, Noctec, Miltown,” she recites, running down her arsenal. 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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