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“It was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational, I thought it was going to save my life,” the unnamed narrator in Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ claims this when justifying her decision to drop out of society for a year with the aid of psychopharmaceuticals. From the point of view of the protagonist, this self-imposed hibernation is not an act of political defiance, instead, it’s a means of inoculating herself against the ennui of modern society.

As a young, conventionally attractive, and privileged woman, the narrator eschews it all with great detachment and indifference. She indicates that although beauty and wealth may not be an index of happiness, they do provide a focal point of examination into a society unknowingly on the brink of change. Known for creating unlikeable female characters, Moshfegh’s latest protagonist pushes the boundaries of likeability even further, creating a misanthrope whose observations of the world and those around her are both caustic and scathing. The novel focuses primarily on the waking episodes of the narrator and her interactions with both her eccentric neck-brace wearing psychiatrist Dr Tuttle, a medical quack with a penchant for paranoia and her only friend Reva, a self-help-touting-Cosmo-reading poster girl for early 2000s post-feminism.

However, it is the death of her parents during her final year in Columbia College which looms large in the novel and provides the narrator with the substantial inheritance required to undertake what she calls a “good American sleep.” While many would assume that this recent turn of events is the primary reasoning for the narcotic-induced slumber, Moshfegh refuses such neat psychological reasoning. Opting instead to show the alienation and narcissism experienced by the narrator during the span of her parent’s lives; her father was an academic who remained a stranger up until his death from cancer and her mother was a self-involved alcoholic who killed herself a few weeks later.

At times, the novel stalls in the middle, although it never loses its momentum, enticing the reader to turn the page in a bid to discover whether such a seemingly insane idea may actually provide the much-needed clarity and sanity to exist in the modern world.  Indeed, by the end of the novel, one will be no doubt left wondering who it was that was really asleep.