Oh, I love this!
Die Zeit recently included this in a “Best of the 21st Century So Far” list. Since I had an unsuccessful odyssey trying to order Lapvona earlier this year and loved Moshfegh’s introduction to this short story collection, I had to buy it. I swear that’s the reason — I’m not creepily copying Zirza’s reading list, this just keeps happening!
Anyway, our young, hot, skinny and rich protagonist decides to spend a year sleeping to recalibrate her body and life, as she likes to think of it. One year, hopped up on a bunch of sleeping pills of various strength and legality, broken up by short trips down to the bodega to get coffee and snacks and visits from her best only friend Reva, who she doesn’t really like that much. It’s all financed by her inheritance from her parents, the dad died of cancer, the mother a few weeks later of, uhm, not cancer. This does not, of course, play a role in her need for sleep, nor does her on-off situationship with an older banker who only knows one position in bed. Or her decision to get a degree in art history and consequently work in the vapid insanity that is the art market world.
If this summary makes the main character sound sympathetic, she is not. She is vain, cold, selfish, destructive, have I mentioned vain and in general an arrogant rich kid brat. She’s also far more vulnerable than she realises and damaged by events completely beyond her control. She is lost, directionless, and very very tired.
The structure of the story meticulously builds up the layers of this unlikeable main character and her relationships with the few people around her before our eyes. So, when the story eventually turns into one of enlightenment and finding peace, the peace is earned.
But don’t get me wrong; this is the polar opposite of Eat, Pray, Love. For the most part, it’s a dark satire (although, I work on the outskirts of the art world and I wish the things in this book were an exaggeration, but they’re not). Even the ‘enlightenment’ and the ways in which people try to achieve it are cruelly satirised by the bonkers Dr who keeps giving the protagonist her sleeping pills. I kept thinking of John Mulaney’s Dr Michael, but as a female hippie/shaman hybrid who had taken too much LSD at some point.
Then it turns into something else. Everyone becomes something else: the directionlessness, the career obsession, the pills, Reva’s bulimia, cancer, death, toxic relationships, knowing your friends, sex and the illusion of closeness, generational wealth, gross consumerism, gossip, the envy inspiring beauty and what we do in search of it, it all goes beyond the personal. If you think a book set in NYC in 2000–2001 is going somewhere specific, you’re right; it’s not even a spoiler. You know it’s coming the whole time you’re reading it, but when it arrives, it doesn’t feel cheap. Everything comes together and paints a dark but clear picture.
Oh, and it’s morbidly funny, too! So yes, I will continue my quest to get Lapvona because Moshfegh has really catapulted herself high on my list of esteemed authors with her clever ideas and direct, beautiful prose.