Imagine this: You and your partner get in a fight. Your partner storms out of the house to get some air. At precisely the moment your partner steps into the road to cross the street, a drunk driver runs a stop sign. Your partner is killed instantly.
Are you responsible for your partner’s death? Your left brain tells you no, the drunk driver is clearly responsible. But you can’t help re-running the scenario that led up to the tragedy again and again. If only you hadn’t been so stubborn, your partner would’ve never left the house and none of this would have happened. If only you had apologized or not nitpicked or just let it go, your partner would still be alive.
*
Such an “if-only” scenario is one of several layers woven into the one-page chapter that ends Ottessa Moshfegh’s sharp, often black-humored novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The central image of that single paragraph is of a woman jumping from one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. The unnamed narrator of the novel has taken to watching a videotape of this scene
on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—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.
Early in the novel Reva is described as a friend of the narrator since college. Then, thirty pages from the end of the novel, there’s a moment where the narrator thinks she can pinpoint the end of the friendship. Reva is a devoted if often unwelcome companion of the narrator, and she is in the North Tower on 9/11 because she had an affair with her married boss, Ken, for whom she worked as an executive assistant at an insurance brokerage firm in Midtown Manhattan. When Reva gets pregnant and things become too messy, Ken has her transferred to the Towers where the firm is starting a crisis consulting offshoot specializing in terrorist risks. Reva is upset at the way Ken has ended the affair, but not at the prospect of working at the World Trade Center, which comes with a promotion. “I kind of like the Twin Towers. It’s peaceful up there.”
Her end is not her fault, but reading the ending of the book it’s impossible not to think “if only Reva hadn’t had the affair!” Or the thousands of other choices, small and large, that lead anyone to be in any place at any moment when something gargantuan happens.
Moshfegh has set up this line of thinking in the way she’s crafted the character of Reva in the preceding two hundred and eighty-eight pages. Much has been written about Moshfegh’s unlikeable narrator, and the protagonist does in fact treat Reva horribly. But Reva is also a challenging character to like, a doormat blindly pursuing the mechanics of a friendship—coming over uninvited to hang out, inviting the protagonist to go out despite all previous invitations being rebuffed—when anyone with a shred of self-respect would have told the narrator to go fuck herself. Reva is shallow and vain, envious of the protagonist’s beauty and independent wealth (an inheritance from her dead parents), and prone to binge drinking. In one memorable passage, the narrator observes that
Reva had an interesting method of mixing her drinks. After each sip of Diet Mountain Dew, she’d pour a little Jose Cuervo into the can to take up the space her sip had displaced so that by the time she finished, she was drinking straight tequila.
In other words, Reva is imperfect and human and entirely judge-able. You can’t help thinking—despite your better judgement and your left brain reminding you it’s the terrorists’ fault and that to think anything else about 9/11 is utterly taboo—if only she hadn’t had the affair! Reva’s end doesn’t even make her more likeable, although the circumstances suggest it should. In that final scene, the tension between how we feel and how we think we should feel commingles with the absolute horror of the decisions facing anyone trapped in the Towers that day. It’s a confrontation, a head-on collision, and it’s pure Moshfegh.
*
Shortly after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I decided to do a long-distance, five-day, charity bicycle ride to raise money for MS research. On the second evening of the ride, I ate dinner with another cyclist who had also been diagnosed with MS. He had experienced devastating relapses from the disease that had left him wheelchair-bound for months at a time. That he was now riding a bicycle seventy to one hundred miles a day at this event was a small miracle, a hero’s journey on paper. But the guy was an asshole—entitled, smug, and entirely unpleasant company. Playing to type, he was also a banker. Turns out being sick didn’t make him likeable, and the shock of this upended my own unconscious beliefs about what it meant to be ill. I thought about the encounter for weeks. I still think about it now.
It also made me keenly aware of the deceit of my own charity-bike-ride narrative, which by definition was performative: Look at me! Diagnosed with an uncurable disease that may one day rob me of my mobility but turning lemons into lemonade like Pollyanna unchained. Even the setup was a scam. Why should people donate money so I can ride my bike from London to Paris and stay at a hotel near the Champs-Élysées at the end? Why not just ask people to donate money to MS research? Or better yet, to research for a disease that most needs funding rather than the one I was personally afflicted by?
Reviewers of My Year of Rest and Relaxation tend to trip all over themselves to apologize for liking a book with unlikeable characters, but Moshfegh’s characters are often relatable precisely for the same reasons they are unlikeable. The hero’s journey is rarely unsullied by humanity.
*
Ostensibly, Moshfegh’s image of Reva jumping is a wake-up call to the unnamed narrator, who recently emerged from a prescription-drug-induced hibernation for the best part of a year that she undertook in hopes of being renewed. “My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets,” she explains. Despite the title of the novel, the cocktail of drugs doesn’t produce the regenerative sleep that she longs for. Instead it creates lengthy blackouts during which she rearranges furniture, shops online, and goes clubbing.
She emerges from her cocoon on June 1, 2011. But not until she witnesses the image of the woman she thinks is Reva, “a human being diving into the unknown and she is wide awake,” does she wake up.
The ending ties up the narrative conceit of the novel, but it belies the subversiveness of Moshfegh’s choice to use the most iconic and forbidden imagery of my generation. When I first read the ending, I was immediately taken back to how much the images of people jumping from the windows of the Towers haunted me after 9/11. I remember discussing them at length with the sensei at the Zen center where I was studying at the time. I knew I wanted to write about this ending, but for weeks I couldn’t bring myself to search for the imagery online. It somehow felt wrong, disrespectful of the victims.
In my head I conjured an image of a woman jumping. When I finally searched for the images online, I realized I had been conflating “Dust Lady,” Stan Honda’s photo of the late Marcy Borders, with “The Falling Man,” a photograph of an unidentified man taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. What I hadn’t remembered is that those and other images of people hanging out the windows of upper floors of the North Tower had sparked such outrage after news outlets first aired and printed them that they were rarely used again. Even the language of what happened to those people remains fraught. Did they jump or fall?
When the woman presumed to be Reva leaps—Moshfegh’s word—from the window at the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she’s emerging from the previous two hundred and eighty-eight pages not as an anonymous victim people know from those haunting, indelible (if imperfectly remembered) photos of 9/11, but one with a fully-formed backstory. Moshfegh has robbed us of whatever narrative we might have imposed on that real-life woman on 9/11. And that’s OK. Our backstory, whatever it was—wife, mother, woman-on-the-go straight out of Sex and the City—probably didn’t involve a woman who sometimes got drunk by replenishing sips taken from a can of Diet Mountain Dew with tequila, although invariably each victim had their own human foibles and eccentricities. The narrator is “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.”
*
At a reading I attended during her book tour, Moshfegh said that the she didn’t set out to write a 9/11 novel. She said she chose that time period because the novel’s premise of a person trying to hibernate for a year simply wouldn’t have worked as well in the always-connected world we live in today. Still, it seems almost impossible to imagine the novel without that one page about 9/11.
My first exposure to Moshfegh was a few years prior to the publication of My Year of Rest and Relaxation when her essay about writing was circulating on the Internet. The ending of that essay, in which she advises writers to write as if their ideal reader was their worst enemy, had stuck with me. Such writing, she concludes, “will be the most daring and smart, because if someone is your enemy, she has the power to hurt you, and so you must hold her in very high regard and will take some pleasure in making her fear for her life.”
I went back to that essay thinking I might find some connection to what she’d done in My Year of Rest and Relxation. I found it in the title, “How to Shit.” Moshfegh explains, “in writing, I think a lot about how to shit. What kind of stink do I want to make in the world?” Early in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator shits on the floor of the art gallery where she works. The scene struck me as not entirely believable when I first read it, but perhaps Moshfegh was playing with her own earlier metaphor about writing.
Ending My Year of Rest and Relaxation with some of the most controversial imagery from 9/11 is certainly a way to make a stink in the world. We may recoil at the medium, but the message rings true.
Jennifer Richardson is the author of Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Full Grown People, and Edible Ojai & Ventura County. She’s working on a lifetime reading plan app, @booketlistapp.