New York, fin de siècle. An, unnamed, feckless young woman stares the 21st century in the face and decides the only way to deal with it is to try and blot it out. So she embarks on a project dedicated to sleeping as much as she possibly can.
There’s something of a Roman Candle effect to Moshfegh’s novel. in the opening chapters it blazes brilliantly. The protagonist’s sardonic voice and the beauty of the idea, (the rational beauty), are engrossing. Why wouldn’t you?, one can’t help thinking. How much better it would have been to have slept through the last two decades. The privileged narrator, who lives on the smart side of New York, previously working in a brilliantly described modern art gallery, exists at the supposed apex of civilisation, mixing with the brightest crowd in the most ostensibly sophisticated city on Earth. Yet she retains an outsider status, deliberately thwarting her own capacity to fit it, or to be ensnared, by this seemingly brilliant world, whose shallowness she’s only too aware of. Hence, she decides to embark on her project.
The problem, perhaps, is that this is a fiercely anti-dramatic project. The sleeping beauty without a prince is a narrative dead end. So the author introduces various tricks and ticks to keep the idea bubbling. Under the influence of a certain drug, the narrator has black-outs, where she wakes up aware that her drugged sleep has masked somnambulant adventures, of which only traces, like her credit card bills and random purchases, remain. The focus switches to her relationship with her doomed friend, Reva, the anti-cool to the narrator’s über-cool.
The narrative starts to fray at the edges as it tries to sustain the brilliance of the opening chapters. Nevertheless, Moshfegh’s novel lucidly captures the uneasy, proto-digital age that dawned with the 21st century, the onset of a time that has lead to the increasing interiorization of communal space, steering us towards a world where no-one needs to leave their bedroom ever again.
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