I listened to Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (MYRR, hereafter) this late Summer. My reaction was distaste for the story and dislike of the unnamed protagonist / narrator. As I finished the book, my overwhelming sense was that Moshfegh had written a book to test sexism: “Can one write a character as unlikable as Mersault from Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and get away with it?”¹

MYRR closely follows The Stranger. In both works, the reader is given little to explain protagonists’ lack of attachment with the world. Why does Mersault feel nothing when his mother dies? Why does the narrator feel comfortable entering a narcotic-induced coma? They are both horrible to those that care for them: Mersault to Marie, Moshfegh’s narrator to tag-along, Reva. And in the closing pages of their respective denouements, they both have a jarring event rip across their respective skylines that seems to jar them to a conscious more familiar to our own.

In the aftermath of their respective tales, we are asked: does their flat affect and lack of affection for the world outside, our world, render them inhuman? Or are their reactions to our world entirely reasonable? It was this question that I wasn’t certain how to answer over these last few months. And I wasn’t sure how to write about this book without having my take on the question settled.

But now I believe I’ve reached a conclusion. In her character’s choices, Moshfegh provides an exploration the proposition of the “The Hero of Non-Action” as presented by David Foster Wallace’s character Hal in Infinite Jest:

We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras

Thus, Moshfegh’s narrator’s disaffection, her desire to sleep a year away through irresponsibly-dispensed drugs, and behavior designed to loosen all social ties is her “Hero of Non-Action” response to a world of artifice and insincerity, “our world.” The Mersault-like behavior of the narrator is therefore secondary to the book’s examination of the question: “How are we to survive these times?” For the narrator, and many of the characters of Infinite Jest, the answer is: “in a narcotic haze to preserve our souls which cannot handle this type of world’s demands.” Seen through this lens, the book became far more sympathetic and compelling.

While this book will never be something I love of glow about, it does have a perspective, and a unique one at that, which suggests value in reading the book.

Researched in exhaustive depth, Bird and Sherwin trace the life, motivations and mystery of one of the true sphinxes of American life (rivalled perhaps only by Thomas Jefferson), J. Robert Oppenheimer.

To capture the scope and breadth and Protean nature of this man would daunt all but the most sedulous and dedicated researchers. But in this carefully-researched biography, Bird and Sherwin tame the untameable mess of anecdote, hearsay, and testimony to give us a picture of this most perplexing, and most thoroughly American, man.