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I think the best books force themselves into our minds and make a quiet disturbance there. They strike something in us, and even if we don’t fully understand it, we feel altered in some strange and irrevocable way.

It is hard to know what to make of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its narrator. I inhaled the story in two quick sittings and found myself afterwards in something of a daze. My mind was spinning, a compass without a lodestone, and no matter how much I held up my feelings to the light, I could not decide if I were feeling bereft that it was over, or simply relieved.

The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a rich, orphaned, conventionally beautiful WASP in her twenties who hopes to annihilate her past and emerge an improved version of herself by devoting an entire year to nothing but sleep. To ensure this transformation, she dopes herself up on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. In her waking hours, she makes regular visits to the street corner bodega, to the drug store, and less regular ones to Dr. Tuttle for the purpose of restocking her supply of pharmaceuticals. She watches popular movies from the 90s (ideally starring Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg), and endures visits from her “best friend�� Reva who drinks, worries about being skinny, makes herself vomit, and recites hollow-eyed feel-good self-help slogans.

This is the baffling premise on which My Year of Rest and Relaxation depends, and Moshfegh makes little effort to rationalize it. Instead, the novel records this process of self-creation—what the narrator describes as her “hibernation”—which (at its most destructive) amounts to a total disavowal of the past, a kind of self-obliteration. Our narrator wants to slough off her past self like old dead skin, and re-emerge into the world more sharply herself. As a possibility, this effort is frightening, but—a little exhilarating too. The longing is that our narrator might pack herself into sleep so deeply and for so long that she can never unpack her (old) self again. After a year of “feel[ing] nothing…a blank slate�� with “no past or present,�� she might raise her head, look into the mirror, and find, reflected back, a completely altered self.

At its heart, this is a novel that reaches to the parts of ourselves that know what it means to live in a world that one does not want, and which one did not choose for themselves, and wanting out. My Year of Rest and Relaxation offers an anti-social way out of such a bind. Our narrator, who “hate[s] talking to people,�� is desperate to express this essential loss to the world, a reprieve that neither friends nor lovers can provide. With no past to lean on or learn from, no future can be imagined, and with a present that is entirely occupied with “black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness,�� our narrator’s acts of self-destruction grow and luxuriate unbearably. She does not attempt to reform or repair the broken pieces of her life, or exercise control over them, nor can she stop the past from reemerging. Scenes from her childhood interrupt her hibernation: a cold, unloving family, and later, a sleazy ex-lover and a ruptured intimacy with a friend she keeps hurting needlessly.

A quote from Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, rose up from some shadowy recess of my mind when I was reading this book: “And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.�� The novel’s narrator is an artist without an art form. Her relationship to art, in fact, is one of greatest disillusionment. In one memorable paragraph, our narrator makes an exact and frankly depressing observation about the state of art:

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate�� their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.

With no art form, no viable outlet for expressing her brokenness, our narrator—in her quest to escape her grief, to be cured of herself and be reborn—simply self-destructs.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation descends into dark places: Moshfegh explores the emotional wreckage of her narrator with a precision both touching and terrifying. There is a liberatory sort of shock to reading about a version of woman that is messy, porous, detestable, cruel, passive, and self-loathing; to transform the novel into a space where that woman is able to bleed and break apart, where she has permission to lose herself and not be wrong. It is that messy rawness of life that makes this novel not just provocative but persuasive as well, a novel that compels the reader into a riskier intimacy, caught up in the strange gravity of a narrator whose acts are both recklessly vulnerable and utterly unforgivable. It also, frankly, puts an unrepentantly horrible narrator in better charity with the reader.

Moshfegh also plays fast and loose with the novel’s traditional plot structure. In a novel of impasse and precarity, such infidelity to plot is required: it gives depth and form to the utter formlessness and trespass of grief. My Year of Rest and Relaxation emphasizes rupture and repetition rather than continuity. There is a sense of unreality to the passage of time in the story: time either moves in stuttering, lumpy pieces, like swimming through syrup, or strangely fast, with a lucidity more terrifying than the narrator’s drug-induced listlessness. It is as though the novel makes the point that time works differently when you’re grieving—or when you’re losing your mind.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation also, crucially, refuses our appetite for resolution. Although the novel ends with a sense of lightness and the spectral possibility of healing, it does not go from “black emptiness�� to an ecstatic, devotional appreciation of living. In Central Park, as our narrator watches “life buzz[ing] between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock,�� she tells us that “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.�� Maybe her sleep did work. Or maybe it was the relief of knowing that, whether we are happy or not, the world simply goes on, in a way that predates all of us, and which will certainly outlive us.