My Year of Rest and Relaxation is narrated in the first person, establishing a personage critics called "an antihero...[who] resists every stereotype of the female nurturer"[3] and "hypnotically unlikeable",[2] perhaps even "an attempt to see just how 'unlikeable' characters can get."[1] Reviewing the novel in Pacific Standard, Rebecca Stoner called the narrator's "acid insights into the various aspects of life that disgust her...one of the primary pleasures of the novel"[2] and in the Chicago Review of Books, Lincoln Michel found the "narrator...an enjoyable hater whose observations are both caustic and insightful."[1] In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino read the novel differently: though she too notes the novel's "withering attention to the gleaming absurdities of pre-9/11 New York City, an environment...beset with delusional optimism, horrifically carefree," Tolentino felt My Year of Rest and Relaxation departed from Moshfegh's earlier work featuring "characters who are repulsed by themselves, or who are themselves repulsive." She argued that this novel "instead builds a façade of beauty and privilege around her characters, forcing the reader to locate repulsion somewhere deeper: in effort, in daily living, in a world that swings between tragic and banal."[6]
The novel is "tuned to a hyper-contemporary frequency," Tolentino wrote, with the narrator's indifference to real-life events highlighting the way her plan for self-improvement by tuning out the world contrasts with "the oft-preached mandates of authenticity or engagement".[6] (At the same time, Tolentino suggested, "There is something in this liberatory solipsism that feels akin to what is commonly peddled today as wellness.")[6]
Critics frequently commented on the "blackly funny" tone of the novel,[7] though in The Guardian, Anthony Cummins noted that "by the end, this comically adversarial narrative" has expanded well beyond comedy, "hitting multiple marks at once: as an art-school prank, a between-the-lines tale of displaced grief and a pitiless anatomy of gender injustice, it also offers (via the inevitable 9/11 ending) a dark state-of-America fable."[7] Accordingly, critics varied in their interpretation of the novel's themes. While some readers interpreted it as a critique of capitalism[2] or an examination of "self-care",[8] Stoner pointed to "an anachronistic belief in the sanctity of art...a faith in the power of art to rouse us, to make us believe that, though the world may feel intolerable, it remains worthwhile to '[dive] into the unknown ... wide awake.'"[2]
