My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

I knew from the first time the narrator said 2000 that the book was going to end on 9/11; you’re supposed to assume that. The thing about 9/11 is that it happened so suddenly, and so close to “home” for Otessa Moshfegh’s readership, the only way to write about it is to devote a lot of attention to the banal before-days without ever acknowledging their banality.

Thus, how a book about a six-month-long Ambien trip turned performance art project can turn out boring. The book didn’t do much for me emotionally or psychologically. It didn’t feel like it was supposed to. I didn’t care about the narrator’s parents (she doesn’t care about them). I didn’t care about New York. I definitely didn’t care about the narrator’s obsession with Whoopi Goldberg. I might have gotten a little invested in the bodega guys, the objects of the narrator’s apartment (i.e., the white fox coat), but I can’t say I’ll remember them tomorrow.

The only narrative suspense the novel has to offer is the portrait of Reva. You have a feeling she will be dead by the end, so much of the book is devoted to her despite the narrator’s pretty pathetic show of feeling for her. By the time she gets transferred to the Twin Towers you know for sure what’s going to happen.

I realize this sounds negative, but I don’t mean it that way. The book was a carefully oriented tonal piece. Feeling and not-feeling are both impossible. How do you write a novel in a world like that? The narrator has to sleep through most of it. Otherwise the contradiction would not hold; the world would tilt.

My sense is that in real life the world tilts towards feeling, the way the narrator watches the video of the 9/11 jumpers “to feel something, or because [she’s] bored.” And indeed, at the very end, Moshfegh reaches towards a pretty classic emotional/thematic conclusion: “she’s awake.” I might have liked a flatter ending. If 9/11 only really mattered because it gave all Americans a reason (an excuse?) to feel something, the narrator seems like the one person who would be immune. But she got the sleep she needed. She’ll emote with the rest of us.

Severance by Ling Ma

“Yes. I took a sip from the wineglass. It tasted bloody. I wanted to tell them that they had made a mistake. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want the same things that they wanted and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths. All of these distinctions, of course, belied the fact that I very much wanted to work in Art. I wanted to be an Art Girl.”

Surveys by Natasha Stagg

“Jim was one of those people who’s so good at making it seem like his only interest in the Internet was the Internet itself. How interesting it is, as a thing. But of course this is self-interest, and my relationship with it has always been far more transparent, and he said he got that, and liked it about me. I liked that he got it and liked it, and that he could tell I got him and that he wasn’t ashamed. What we got was that there were all these unwritten codes, that every message, because it was coded, was sitting on a mountain of meaning. Literally, everything is code and coded, but on top of that, coded into a context, online. Showing a circuit board look and MIDI-style sound felt like less code, like baring the bones. But these aesthetic choices were cluttering up the streamlining of the universe, not minimalizing it. We were asking about art and representation, and about the modern notion of a man and a woman devoted to each other. We were dropping in U-turn signs on everyone else’s roads, smiling at each other, driving forward.”