Rejecting the World
The 2010s were a plum era for novels about women sliding off the grid. Do we see them differently now?
Words and Image: Alexandra Atiya
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh can all be found at Type Books or your favourite independent bookstore.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation imagines a young female protagonist who wants to stop time, to hibernate in her New York City apartment. Through careful planning and deliberate hoarding of drugs, she manages to succeed and at the age of twenty-six, she takes to her bed for most of the year 2001.
My Year has taken on new relevance in the current moment of lockdown. Whereas the novel’s housebound, antisocial anti-heroine seemed outlandish two years ago, she now feels eerily familiar, a little ahead of the curve. I’ve heard more than a couple of friends jokingly ask whether they can hibernate through the economic shutdown and wake up when the virus is gone. Not working, staying inside all day, subsisting on food delivery—what was once a frightening routine is now commonplace. I must admit that I too thought of Moshfegh’s sleeper when quarantine started. Maybe she had the right idea. I shudder now to read some of these lines: “I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa…” The nameless protagonist knows that some people might regard her hibernation as suicide: “In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational.”
The funny part is that I didn’t strongly care for the book when I’d first read it a couple of years ago. I thought it was brilliantly realized, with an exceptional central conceit, but also hard, cold, mean-spirited. It was openly cruel to its characters, especially the protagonist’s needy friend Reva. The novel’s style was nevertheless extraordinary, and it interested me on a different level: it felt like it was a seeping blurry dream, something that had already happened somehow.
It also fit my life in strange ways. The character lives on the Upper East Side—where I’d gone to high school and where my parents still lived. Her father died of prostate cancer; my father had just been diagnosed with the disease when the novel came out. On a hot, wet New York summer day in 2018, I read a scene in which the protagonist sits beside her bedridden father, “watching him wither.” He’s moored at home in a hospital bed, and as he dies, the narrator begs her father to send a sign “that there’s life on the other side.” I got chills as I read on the subway.
Those resonances deepened in the past few months. My father died in early March, just as the quarantine began, and since I’d gone down to New York to be with him, I ended up stranded in Manhattan for the first part of lockdown. My Year is fanciful in many ways, and draws liberally on qualities of fairy tales, yet it also precisely captures something about New York. By shrinking from the city’s endless life, the narrator evokes the city’s indifference. No one—not her doctor, not the clerks at the bodega she frequents, not her on-again-off-again boyfriend, not even her devoted friend Reva—can spare enough energy to discern the narrator’s complete unhinging. The characters exist in near-perfect states of self-involvement. Re-reading My Year now, in isolation and in mourning, it impresses me even more for the potency of its depiction of grief. I was inside a dark and spacious apartment, looking out on a city in the midst of shutting down.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation isn’t alone in exploring the idea of female resistance to the heavily-proscribed steps of normal life. It is one of a few books I’ve read in the past couple of years that clustered around the same themes: sleeping beauties, women who had slid off the tracks, women who had uncontrolled outbursts of violence or self-destruction. Specifically, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata seemed to contain some of the same elements. The settings are wildly different—Convenience Store Woman is about a grocery store clerk in Tokyo and My Sister, the Serial Killer is about a nurse in Lagos—and the roles are configured differently—in Braithwaite’s novel, the destructive psychopath is the protagonist’s sister, and the sleeping beauty is a male coma patient whom she tells about her sister’s murders. The dead father who looms over My Sister is abusive rather than benign. But it struck me that these books all dealt with the same tensions, the same questions about how and when women can slide off the course of work and motherhood that’s often defined as the standard of female fulfillment.
In all three novels, the protagonists hold self-effacing jobs: a nurse, a grocery store clerk, a gallery assistant, and they simultaneously revel in and rage at the invisibility that those jobs provide. In My Sister, the narrator, Korede, is obsessed with cleaning, with bleaching away all traces of human contact, of maintaining a perfectly white uniform. This comes in handy, given that she has to help her sister wipe up crime scenes. But it’s also a sign of her feeling secondary to her sister, her need to eliminate evidence of herself. The effacement parallels My Year’s fixation on hibernation, on coming as close to death as possible while still being alive. In Convenience Store Woman, Keiko is 36 and yet continues to work a job that her family—as well as society as a whole—views as acceptable only if it’s temporary. She doesn’t want a husband or kids, despite her sister’s protestations. She just wants to maintain the order of the store, which to her is a perfect and complete closed world.
All three novels share a similar dark, often very funny tone, their first-person narrators coolly assertive as they describe outrageous events. The style is straightforward, un-metaphoric, borderline absurd. They seem to pull you along, with little reflection, into a description of a world that simply is. They function on dream logic and calmly walk you through the maelstrom. The novels are also all profoundly readable: short, dark and brutal, it’s easy to consume each of them in one sitting.
In all three, another female figure—a sister or a friend—is the counterpoint, the person who can view the destructive urge with skepticism. Yet the counterpoints are also warped by the inwardness and destructiveness of the central character. The novels’ characters are deeply invested in creating order and control in a hostile world. The store, the apartment, the hospital, the act of cleaning, the need to cocoon—the characters inhabit their microcosms fully, without wanting to look out on any broader obligations.
What does it meant to see three such novels crop up simultaneously from such different parts of the world? I’m not sure that it means anything, at least not much more than it would mean to encounter three stories of male ennui set in Tokyo, Lagos and New York. But these three books are fascinating to reconsider in this time in which we’ve all been made sleeping beauties, all asked to put our lives on hold in some form, in which death, violence and mortality can no longer be submerged.
They’re books about characters who don’t follow the normal track—they won’t get married, have kids, go after jobs. But what does that mean, now, in this world, in which holding a job, let alone advancing your career, is impossible for so many people, in which the thought of having children is a nightmare, in which relationships are frozen and proscribed in small circles. These characters are divorced from pleasure and obligation, and that disconnect makes them question how alive they really are, why living is often measured by others’ standards. I see these loners differently now, and find that their stories make good companions in quarantine.