Plot Summary – It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question.

★★★★½

I think a lot of people would find this book boring or without plot or whatever else bad faith criticism people like to make of literary fiction. I have often considered the whole “art” v “entertainment” debate as futile, but have often found myself engaged in the discussion anyways. But for me, the argument falls apart simply because what I percieve to be bad writing makes the literature uninteresting and therefore not entertaining either. So when I find a book as rich with ideas as this one, I don’t look for a plot or a start or an end or characters to root for. That’s not the point. The point is to think, and this book made me think so much. About class, about privilege, about substance abuse, about friendship and the superficiality of a lot of the things we do on a day-to-day basis. The protagonist who remains unnamed is one of the most complex and interesting characters I’ve ever read. Most ‘villains’ or ‘anti-heroes’ are still written with some pretention of believing or wanting to do ‘good’, but the leading woman of this book has no such airs or graces, she’s quite plainly, an awful person and seems to be deeply self-aware of it.

Her year of ‘rest’ and ‘relaxation’ is neither restful nor relaxing and that might be the point. She is constantly mentioning the oxymoronical nature of her stupor. The side-characters we are introduced to are all also so funny and different that anything I’ve ever read in any other media. Terrible mothers, surface-level friends and insane professionals fill the pages of this book, and they all provide so much color to an otherwise dark book. This book is a real embodiment of “I support women’s rights and women’s wrongs”. A book that will have me thinking about it for years to come for sure. I highly recommend this book if you like having your beliefs challenged, but don’t pick this one up if you want something conventional.