MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

Thank goodness this book is fiction, because otherwise it would be appalling.  The unnamed first-person narrator is a young, beautiful, affluent New Yorker who wants to reboot her life by sleeping for a year.  However, she finds her goal not that easy to attain and enlists the help of Dr. Tuttle, a psychiatrist who prescribes every nature of sleep-inducing drug imaginable and can’t remember that the narrator’s parents are both deceased.  The fact that the narrator is now an orphan may be what has propelled her toward hibernation, but I was never totally sure about that.  Her one friend, Reva, checks up on her now and then but mostly just envies and aspires to the narrator’s effortless beauty and style.  So how can a novel about a sleeping beauty hold the reader’s attention, especially since there is no prince to come wake her up with a kiss?  For one thing, the narrator sometimes wakes to find that she has left her building and gone shopping, among other things, while she was under the influence of a drug called infermiterol (invented by the author).  Her ex-lover Trevor has moved on, but that doesn’t stop her from calling him and threatening suicide in order to get his attention.  In other words, this woman is disturbed, but perhaps her self-prescribed sleep therapy will work, after all.  She just needs to devote as much effort to getting her act together as she does to achieving a year of dormancy.