![]() After some neat planning, the heroine takes enough of these to black out several months without dying or doing anything that fucks her up too bad. Melfi from The Sopranos) gives our heroine a made-up drug that takes away time in neat three day black out chunks. Spoiler alert- the narrator’s quack psychiatrist (the voice actress makes her sound a good amount like Dr. But it becomes a lot less so when you realize the shape of its arc: family-inherited trauma to extreme behavior turns to crescendo to bliss-out. This has a reasonably interesting premise- world-despising privileged lady tries to blot out world. What I am is a reader looking for something interesting. I’m not a preacher looking for a moral, a charitable foundation looking to means test those I’d dole out my reading fee-fees to, or a consumer looking for stronger jerks on my tear ducts. I’ve known enough rich kids to know their lives aren’t all great. I get that rich and beautiful people get depressed and that depression sucks no matter who it happens to. That they continue flaunting this perk as they do nothing - show that they’re capable of doing nothing - while the world burns… The ultimate perk of the world elite at this moment is for their individual pain to matter. I’m reminded of Tocqueville talking about how what pissed the sans-culottes in the French Revolution more than anything wasn’t the power of the nobility, which had been declining for years, but the perks and privileges and swanning around the nobles still did, even as they were completely useless even in their own terms. But… there’s a reason, above and beyond political bullshit and posturing, for why that critique rings out so often. It’s not like writing about the underprivileged is some magic ticket to good writing (and how many of these same people gatekeep people away from writing about people other than themselves?). Look… I’m persnickety enough to by now be a little bit sick of the “I’m so tired of hearing about privileged people in literature!” thing. No wonder she wants to xanax herself into sleep for a year, though the assumption that that will help somehow is at least as delusional (or anyway should be seen as such) as Reva’s crash diets to attract a man’s attention. For the most part, though, all her sensitivity gets her is an increased sense of disdain for everything and everyone around her. She certainly sees through the pretensions of the art world when she works for a gallery downtown, in what are probably the book’s best passages. ![]() Her parents are dead upper middle class jerks (probably not actually rich enough to have left her enough money to live in the LES, but who cares, it’s the early aughts). She has an art history degree, conventional beauty, inheritance money, and an annoying best friend named Reva who’s enough of a “Jewish American Princess” stereotype to be borderline antisemitic. ![]() ![]() The unnamed narrator is a woman in her twenties living in the fancy Upper East Side. And for once, a somewhat interesting concept: a young woman in turn-of-the-millennium New York tries to zonk herself out for a year, on the idea she’ll come out the other side better off. A little typical at times- a lot of lists of three items separated by “ands,” but hell, it’s only three, compared to the great galloping mock-heroic and-lists we’re used to seeing that’s downright restrained. For one thing, Moshfegh’s prose isn’t bad. It doesn’t help when it makes me think I’m just not capable of relating to the experiences of people different from myself, even if I know that’s a way publishers guilt people into buying their books…Ī gloomy start to this review, I suppose, but this one wasn’t all bad, not as bad as some other recent examples of capital-L Literature I could cite. It used to feel kind of good, thinking I was above contemporary literature- now the sheer lack of interest to be found there gets me down. I really do try with these works of recent literature, especially those written by women. Ottessa Moshfegh, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2018) (narrated by Julia Whelan) – I don’t know, man. Name Asterisk on Review- Ma, “Harassment A… ![]() Review – Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”. ![]()
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