Isabel Marqués answers “I wonder if this is an allegory about...”

Jamie asked this question about My Year of Rest and Relaxation:

I wonder if this is an allegory about commercialism, secularism, and addiction? The novel ends with 9/11 and one of the characters is alluded to a woman who jumped from the twin towers. The suggestion of the narrator's awakening to a new reality based more on frugality, giving up dvds, videos etc. hints at alternative way of viewing the world.

Isabel Marqués

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[I don't know if I'd call it an allegory because to me the whole story sounds more like an explicit critique of capitalism, class and gender privilege, and also a suggestion of the impossibility of composing a solid counter-narrative of it (let alone to find an alternative way to live). I think one of the novel's achievements is that the narrator is no longer a traditional unreliable voice, but rather one leads readers in and out of a world in which she actively, if reluctantly, takes part. While it's easy for us to understand her motifs and ambiguity, there's always a safe ironic distance that allows us to be critical with everything she does - starting with her year-long sleep project, which to me echoes these neoliberal rituals like the cleanse, the makeover, the yoga retire, the detox diet, etc.
As for the interpretation of the ending, I think it's definitely ambiguous and Moshfegh plays under multiple layers of [literary] convention and [historical] expectation. I remember that the first time I read it I interpreted it as a moment of epiphany and a realization of how much she truly loved Reva (I think this is an easy reading because Moshfegh makes us pity Reva all the time, while appreciating her rare, innocent intelligence). But now I think that if there's an epiphany, is more like a twisted one, not exactly illuminating, but even more confusing (a bit like what Deborah Eisenberg calls "reverse epiphany"). The protagonist is amazed by the falling woman's "awakeness" in her decision to jump off the building, but as @Hayes says, it sounds pretty dark and depressing, knowing that she's barely choosing another way to die. In this sense, I think Moshfegh doesn't show much hope for any kind of alternative political action (the popularization of "woke culture" outside the BLM movement resonates here), but on the other hand, there may be a true recognition of individual choices and unusual alliances (remember that Reva has usually been been portrayed as a sort of postfeminist replicant, "a drone" and her friend often wondered if she'd ever "wake up").
Also, I don't think the novel works well as a 9/11 text in itself, but it probably expects readers to analyse it from the point of view of a critical subject in the late 2010s. I mean, many of us know about what came after the event, and how the pictures of people falling from the Towers were used as part of a narrative of martyrs and heroes in a campaign for the war on terror, and later for the intervention in Iraq. So the protagonist's fascination for the falling woman may be yet another morbid joke that points to the brutal prevalence of the State in human decisions, but also to the possibility for tiny liminal states for freedom and resistance. (hide spoiler)]

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

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