The Night Train to Georgia Plus "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" Book Review

Finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation on the train ride down to the city.

Wasn’t pleased with the last third of the book. It’s savage and funny and take-no-prisoners right up to the scenes of Reva’s mother’s funeral, but after that Moshfegh seems to be at a loss how to incorporate the most significant plot developments into the narrative.

The theme of the novel, insofar as it has a theme, is objectification: A beautiful, brilliant young woman decides to purge herself both of her need to objectify and of her own potential for objectification; she sets about this in the most brutal and pitiless manner imaginable: She decides to sleep for a year. (Fortunately she has an independent income!) In her few waking moments, she deliberately sabotages every human relationship except for one, which she can’t shake off, no matter how hard she tries. Her self-described “best friend” Reva is doggishly devoted and remains devoted no matter how hard the nameless heroine tries to alienate her.

Reva, the pathetic “best friend”, is a remarkable characterization: Half the girls I went to Hunter High School with were Revas. The scene where the nameless heroine rampages Reva’s apartment, searching for her stolen drug stash, is really brilliant in its juxtaposition of status details. Unfortunately, as a plot point, it goes absolutely nowhere, though. Moshfegh’s descriptions of the quack psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle—her pill pusher—are equally brilliant and hysterically funny.

One suspects that when Moshfegh began writing this novel, she had a very, very clear image of how the novel would end and a somewhat murkier idea of how her protagonist would get to that end. That clear image is inextricably linked to a historical timeline, which Moshfegh perforce had to write to.

My sense is that Moshfegh ran out of steam writing to that particular timeline and therefore had to dispatch six months of the protagonist’s life in a single chapter.

This felt… unbalanced.

It also kind of felt like a rip-off because this six months was actually the most interesting development in the narrative: The protagonist turns over her vacated body to a grotesque performance artist named Ping Xi. (Ping Xi becomes famous earlier in the novel for stuffing paint pigments into his dick and then jacking off on enormous canvases.) Ping Xi uses the protagonist’s body to create a series of disturbing paintings. This is actually the most thematically significant part of the novel, and though I realize the dilemma the writer was up against—the novel is written in a very close, first person point of view, and yet how can you write a first person point of view when your protagonist is Sleeping Beauty?—I feel like there was a way she could have done it. It would have required one more draft, though. She ran out of steam.

Notwithstanding, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is brilliant. Although it is not a novel I would recommend to most people. You'd have to be pretty comfortable with post-modernist deconstruction not to be utterly repulsed by it.

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I was on my way to the city to meet the Beautiful Pollster and the Effervescent Life Coach, both pals from the super-seekrit political group, now two years in the past.

Both interesting and dynamic women, so I had a fabulous time. The Effervescent Life Coach in particular has a sunny self-assurance about her that is very appealing. I remember one time she talked me down from a snipe fest I was having online with a particularly loathsome Millennial; she did it in a way that was respectful to me and respectful to the loathsome Millennial, and I was quite impressed with her mediation skills.

We met at a Georgian restaurant called Old Tbilisi Garden. Georgian food is quite unlike anything I have ever eaten before. In particular, they do this bread cheese boat called kachapuri, which consists of freshly baked bread, a kind of feta-like cheese and an egg that cooks from the heat of the freshly baked bread that turns the cheese into a type of custard. It was amazing.



Conversation was great, and walking through the West Village on a frigid, moonless night also has its charms.

I had a very good time.

I decided to go back up to Hudson Valley (though I’m sure my beloved pal ahem-Camille would have proffered her guestroom) because I have tons of To Do list items that must be done today and because since I typically spend four hours a day reading anyway, I might as well read on a train.

On the way back, I finished Volume 2 of Bernard Cornwall’s Saxon Chronicles. Destiny is all!

We are presently battening down the hatches for the monster snowstorm scheduled for tomorrow. Hideous white stuff from the sky!