There was a joke at Rolling Stone magazine that if the drugs ran out at a party, one could find Hunter S. Thompson and suck on him. Depressives without prescriptions could lick Moshfegh’s heroine’s elbow.

Image Ottessa Moshfegh Credit... Krystal Griffiths

The narrator begins to sleep most of the day and sometimes to go on walkabouts while blacked out. She wakes to find that she has gone to clubs or had her pubic hair waxed or rearranged her furniture. Once she comes to on the Long Island Rail Road, a waking nightmare for sure.

She decides her life would be better if she slept all the time. A practiced lotus-eater, she finds the drug that will help her realize this ambition. It’s called Infermiterol. On it she dozes for three days at a time. She decides to take 40 of them, sequentially, in order to sleep for four months. A downtown artist will bring her food and film her for a pretentious project.

Moshfegh, happily, is not overly interested in her narrator’s back story, in the pain (or absence of it) that has driven her to become a voidoid. Her parents died (cancer, overdose) while she was in college, but she wasn’t close to either of them.

Her narrator has a friend, Reva, whom she treats abysmally, and an ex-boyfriend, Trevor, with whom she’s still in touch. Reva worries about her friend’s torpidity, at the way she is self-eaten, like a consumptive. She tells her she is “squandering” her bikini body.

The narrator’s motives are not suicidal. “My hibernation was self-preservational,” she says. “I thought that it was going to save my life.” About her sleep, she declares: “If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.”

If she’s on downers, the prose in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is mostly on uppers. Like its narrator, this is a remorseless little machine. Moshfegh’s sentences are piercing and vixenish, each one a kind of orphan. She plays interestingly with substance and illusion, with dread and solace on the installment plan. This book builds subtly toward the events of Sept. 11.