I can't point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. [p. 17]
The unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the archetypal 'poor little rich girl': white, beautiful, wealthy and cultured, but desperately unhappy. I'm not sure the author intended us to empathise with her, but I did, to some extent. However, it's abundantly clear that she is not a nice person. She's blind to her own privilege, vile to her best friend Reva, a pathological liar, selfish and manipulative. She's obsessed with her abusive and manipulative ex, and contemptuous of the NYC art gallery where she works.
She is also suffering from severe mental illness, and her solution is to spend a year 'hibernating', sleeping or doped up as much as possible, to refresh and renew herself. With the aid of her 'irresponsible and weird' psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, she experiments with a cocktail of psychoactive drugs that, realistically, would probably kill anyone who took so many for so long. Infermiterol (the author's invention) turns out to be the the solution: it bestows three-day blackouts during which the protagonist apparently shops, goes clubbing, smokes cigarettes and so on, but of which she retains no memory.
At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist describes her urge to hibernate as 'the opposite of suicide ... self-preservational': but to me it seemed as though she was trying to erase herself, continuing the erasure perpetrated by her parents, her classmates, her various exes, even her (only) friend Reva. None of those people seem to perceive our narrator, or engage with her emotionally: they may as well be talking to, interacting with, themselves. Even Dr Tuttle, dispenser of pharmaceuticals, isn't interested enough to challenge any of the narrator's lies.
I found myself empathising with the narrator at various points: some of her experiences of rejection echoed some of mine. And I empathised with her urge to curl up and hide from the world. The image at the end of the novel, "a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake" [p. 289] affected me strongly, though that may just be because of the actual event it fictionalised.
Gorgeous writing, savage satire, horrible-yet-pitiable narrator: I'm not sure I'd call this an enjoyable novel but I found it compelling.
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