My Year of Rest and Relaxation

A shocking hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life on the surface. Young thin pretty a recent Columbia graduate she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for like everything else by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?. This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal us from our alienation from this world shows us how reasonable even necessary that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.