the 9/11-adjacent novel that'll unnerve you
Today’s link is guest-deezed by freelance writer and editor Naomi Shavin, in which she reviews one of the strangest, perspective-wrenching books either of us have ever read:
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It’s the second day of Rosh Hashanah and it’s 9/11. And so maybe you, like me, are having a contemplative day.
Today, I am contemplating many things, among them: my mistakes and regrets of the last year, my hopes for the new year, what has happened in our country in the last year, what I hope will happen in the future … and, very much relatedly, a book that I have been obsessed with since I started it (and only more so after finishing it), Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Without revealing anything that the first chapter doesn’t, I can say this: the book begins in June of 2000, in New York City, and from the title alone, you can expect the timeline of the book to run at least one year. Every timestamp in the book feels like a countdown to the inevitable tragedy.
Every paraphrased headline (“The new president was going to be hard on terrorists,” “Giuliani said cursing at a cop should be a crime”) is less a marker of how much our country changed in the wake of 9/11 – and more how little. I saw that The New Yorker published a piece this week from Jeffrey Toobin, “How Rudy Giuliani Turned Into Trump’s Clown.” Read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and the metamorphosis Toobin describes will strike you as obvious, too.
I was 10 years old on September 11, 2001. That terrible day was the end of era, certainly, and also the beginning of so many things, including my own political consciousness. I didn’t consciously realize it before starting the book, but I desperately needed to revisit the tragedy and its aftermath in a way that might help me make sense of it as an adult. My Year of Rest and Relaxation did that shockingly, stunningly, effectively.
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