this book pissed me off so bad!!!! i was genuinely excited because it seemed like it was right up my alley, but now i guess i can safely say this is WAY overhyped, as both a new york novel and a sad girl novel.

may be spoilers ahead.

1) god i HATED how she treated reva. HATED it. i hated how consistently cruel she was, and it really went too far, for me. reva was a far more compelling character to me and i understood why the protagonist would feel the way she did, but like, we get it. you've made your point. enough. i was interested in their friendship but i often felt violently unwell when she was talking about reva. i can read any sort of shock horror with a straight face but i guess i draw the line at people harbouring genuinely repugnant private thoughts about their friends. (come to think of it, my reaction reminds me of how i felt about cersei's chapters in asoiaf/affc, so i guess i just have a particular ick around reading that sort of thing.)

2) i think the language of this book is a little too contemporary to make it a convincing y2k novel. some of how moshfegh writes about technology just felt a little blasé, like she was talking about stuff that had been around forever, except in 2000 it was actually brand new/not all that common. this really detracted from my comprehension of this as being something rooted in its era. maybe it's part of the conceit, but it did not work for me.

3) i did think there were some interesting ideas at play in this book. (that said, i don't think i would've touched it if i knew how much of it was about cancer, my least favourite Theme to explore in fiction.) but, here's the kicker: you want me to sympathise with a pretty, skinny, rich WASP? i know this is HEAVILY signposted, but like, the way she's like "i'm not stupid, i don't want to give up my privilege" was an unsatisfying way of dealing with her, honestly, fetishisation of poverty. like the ending felt raaaaather common_people.mp3, you know? i LOVE an unlikable rich protagonist!! i love reading about horrible rich people like you would not believe. i love reading satires on rich people in the art world. but NONE of that worked for me here; i felt that with the protagonist, moshfegh was trying too hard to thread the needle between "she's too privileged" and "she is genuinely lost and miserable." an interesting balance to strike, but not the way it was done here. and everything about the art world was SO extreme, so cartoonish, that it was hard to buy into the satire. like girl your lifestyle is another side of the same coin...

anyway at least it was a quick read ( )

i too want to sleep forever and never do anything
this was really unique and comfy but also kinda suffocating

-some parts were a tad too crude for the rest of the book?
-she kinda sucked as a person but it was still super entertaining and i would read this again ( )

wow 200 pages about someone sleeping. loved it ( )

Our narrator, a young, beautiful, and wealthy New Yorker, hates everything and everybody, so she decides to take a sort of gap year and just sleep. With the help of many, many different medications prescribed by an absolutely batty psychiatrist, she does just that.

It's absolutely true that you can enjoy a book with zero likable or relatable characters, especially if it's well-written and full of witty social commentary. It's just not for me right now. ( )

Moshfegh has written misanthropic fiction in which her wretched characters suffer deeply set during the 1850s (McGlue), the 1950s (Eileen), the current day (Homesick for Another World), and now that nightmarish period of American meaninglessness between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when all we really had anymore was peace and prosperity. The unnamed narrator of this novel is the least wretched so far in material terms - she's a wealthy heiress and beautiful as a supemodel - but that means little. She'll hold her own in existential ennui.

Her career in the arts world is a joke because the art world is a joke, completely colonized by capitalism (“Stacey Bloom had started a magazine called Kun(s)t about ‘women in the arts,’ mostly profiles of rich art-party girls who were starting their own fashion lines or opening galleries or nightclubs or starring in indie movies. Her father was the president of Citibank.”). Her parents were always cold to her and now they're both dead. She dislikes her only friend. She decides to use prescription medication to sleep most of a year away, hoping to emerge a changed person on the inside (but not the outside - "I was born into privilege," I told Ping Xi. "I am not going to squander that. I'm not a moron.").

Does it work? Moshfegh suggested that she might be prepared to believe in the possibility of transformation from miserableness to happiness in Eileen, as that character narrated her story decades afterwards the story's events from evidently a much better place. Here she seems ambivalent. The story ends on 9/11, with the image of a jumper falling to her death from the Towers: "I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake."

9/11 as an awakening moment has been used a lot, of course, but usually it's meant in an active, improving way. Here it's referenced using the image of someone just becoming aware moments before plummeting to their death, so... pluses and minuses, I suppose. Pluses and minuses. ( )