★★★★☆
I’ll start by saying that this was a fantastic read.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is an acidic book, laced with so much sarcastic, bitter humour that it almost set my teeth on edge. The premise is simple. It is the year 2000, Upper Manhattan. A nameless young woman narrates her attempt to find spiritual rebirth by sleeping off her demons for an entire year.
Though we never know her name, she is a distinctive protagonist. She is a model-thin natural blonde WASP, too rich to worry about money, but also a hollowed out wreck of a person, so disassociated from her emotions and the world that it is difficult to view her privilege as anything meaningful.
The thing I really liked about this book is that there are so many ways to read it. On one level, it is a dark comedy dressed up as chick lit. On another, it is a painful journey through a young woman’s tortured soul. It is a story about a toxic, complicated friendship, a satire on privilege and the art world, and also a philosophical exploration of all the problems money can fix, as well as those it can’t.
Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed. I’d get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again.
It is really easy to read, but there is surprising depth when you look for it. The narrator’s deadpan voice sometimes has the effect of glazing over how shocking the narrative is, but I think this is on purpose – it gives the reading experience parallels with the protagonist’s journey.
The tone pulls you under, but every so often I would kind of snap out of the book, like a sudden awakening, realise how grotesque the whole thing was, before diving back into the oblivion the protagonist spends her year navigating.
Rest and Relaxation is an ugly book. The humour is like a thick cake of makeup on bad acne. The barbed sarcasm actually draws attention to that which the character uses it to hide. I thought this was clever writing, and I liked that this book was about someone with serious flaws. The selfishness is ugly, and so is the sadistic way in which the narrator uses her best friend (and allows herself to be used in return). I think it’s meant to be vicious though. This isn’t a feel-good book about an upstanding person trying to get through their trauma without hurting anyone. Although it brims with the frivolousness of a life with too much money, it is, under that veneer, a cutting story about a person dismissing the pretensions of morality in a dogged effort to survive.
Reva scratched an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think that Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine.
I was gripped, and though I got through this book at record pace, it left my brain with a lot to chew on. I would agree it is problematic and provocative, even insensitive, but I think that is what makes it so good. The protagonist is a top-notch antihero – she gives the reader every reason to despise her, but somehow I just couldn’t. Definitely not the kind of person I would want as my friend, but a character whose poison makes them interesting, a bit like Charlize Theron in the movie Young Adult.
I probably would have given this one the full five stars, but having slept on it, I’m not sure about the ending. There is an odd little epilogue that takes the final page on a jarring handbrake turn. It just didn’t seem to flow on naturally from the rest of the book, and I couldn’t work it out.
Overall though, I really rate this one. It has teeth, it is intelligent, and it is a fascinatingly warped story of growth. Whether our narrator is a better person by the end is debatable, but she and her world have changed.
Darker Fables 