My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Reva is a Columbia-educated Jewish woman in her mid-twenties who works as an executive assistant at an insurance brokerage firm in Manhattan. Unlike the narrator, Reva does not come from a wealthy family but aspires to adopt a comfortable, upper-middle class lifestyle. Reva is deeply concerned with her appearance; she studies women’s lifestyle magazines to keep up with fashion trends and buys knockoff designer handbags to appear well-off. Though already trim at a size 4, Reva is also concerned with her weight and has dealt with bulimia for years.

Given her somewhat superficial ambitions, Reva views her best friend, the novel’s narrator, as the ideal woman and something to which she should aspire. Wanting what her best friend has naturally—beauty, wealth, thinness—Reva is jealous of the narrator. Although on the whole Reva is attentive and caring toward the narrator, she makes no effort to hide her envy, often remarking, “No fair” whenever “something good happens” to the narrator (10). To deal with her insecurities and personal shortcomings, Reva often turns to alcohol for escape. Her drinking is habitual and often extreme, and the narrator believes Reva “would probably qualify as an alcoholic” (11).

By the end of the novel, Reva appears to have transformed into her ideal version of herself; having inherited the narrator’s designer clothing and jewelry, and now holding down a corporate job at the World Trade Center, Reva is gradually moving up in the world. Despite this progress, the novel’s final chapters imply she dies tragically in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Though the woman in the news clip may not be Reva, the narrator says Reva is “gone.”

Dr. Tuttle is a psychiatrist in New York City who provides the narrator with a myriad of pills under the incorrect assumption that the narrator has severe insomnia. The scatterbrained and peculiar doctor is a cartoonish character and, given all her absurdities, a major source of humor. Though she is a vaguely benevolent figure, this benevolence goes only as far as her congenial tone and the concern she intermittently expresses for the narrator; she is devoid of malice, but her professional comportment is cavalier.

The narrator discovers Dr. Tuttle in the Yellow Pages and is surprised when she answers her phone call inquiring about treatment at 11pm on a Tuesday. When they meet in person at her office, Dr. Tuttle is even more eccentric than she seemed on the phone, wearing a neck brace that is the result of a “taxi accident” and holding a chubby cat.

Throughout their entire relationship, Dr. Tuttle does little to genuinely assess the narrator’s supposed insomnia, demonstrating a glaring lack of medical ethics. The psychiatrist is not only unscientific—often citing pseudoscience or making bizarre remarks, like how genes can pass from mother to child during childbirth—but she is also incompetent in psychotherapy, which she attempts with some zeal but no rhyme or reason. While a more attentive doctor may pursue structured psychological questioning about emotional factors in her patient’s sleep disorder, Dr. Tuttle jumps from topic to strange topic and never effectively uncovers anything, nor does she help lead the narrator toward much self-discovery. Most often, she makes offhand assumptions about the narrator’s predicament and supplies her with a dangerous amount of pills from a preposterous variety of drug classes.

Like the narrator herself, the narrator’s mother remains unnamed throughout the novel. Characterized by her daughter as aloof and unapproachable, the narrator’s mother was a housewife, though not a particularly functional one. While she was alive, she spent her days at home drinking and sleeping, barely interacting with her husband or daughter. When her husband died of cancer in their living room, the narrator spent days by his side, crying, while her mother stayed locked in her bedroom, guzzling down hard liquor.

The narrator can recall only a small handful of moments throughout her childhood when her mother made her feel loved, but those moments were fleeting and often followed by inexplicable panic or hysteria. The one activity the narrator recalls enjoying with her mother is sleeping; following a conflict between her parents when the narrator was in elementary school, the narrator and her mother spent weeks sleeping in the same bed. The young narrator often skipped school altogether in favor of staying with her mother, who lazed around all day.

Six weeks after the death of the narrator’s father, the narrator’s mother died by suicide, mixing alcohol and sedatives. She left a note that said, “Goodbye,” followed by a list of people she had known throughout her life; the narrator “was sixth on the list of twenty-five” (152). Her death, for the narrator, only supports her belief that her mother hated her. While her father died from cancer, her mother made the conscious choice to leave her daughter alone in the world.

The narrator’s father was a science professor at a university in New York. He did not have a close relationship with his daughter, though she believes she takes after him as “dispassionate, sulky, even a little snide at times” (49). His daughter describes him as “serious,” “sterile,” and virtually a stranger to her when she was growing up under his roof.

The narrator’s father died from cancer when she was a junior in college. She missed a week of classes to sit by his side, often crying and begging him “not to leave me alone with my mother” (139). During this time, the narrator’s father did little to reassure her—other than asserting that he himself would be alright—and was indifferent to her anguish. On the day he died, he informed his daughter matter-of-factly that he will be dying in the afternoon. As predicted, he died later that day.

Ping Xi is a 23-year-old artist from southern California. After being kicked out of art school for firing a gun in an art studio, Ping Xi was picked up by Ducat, the upscale art gallery where the narrator works as an assistant. He is known in the art community for sparking controversy and prioritizing shock value rather than substance. The narrator finds his art pretentious and shallow.

In the second half of the novel, the narrator enlists Ping Xi—whom she has been unconsciously partying with in her Infermiterol-induced blackouts—to help her buckle down on her hibernation project. She gives him a key to her apartment, which can only be opened from the outside, and instructs him to ensure that she does not leave until June 1. In exchange, Ping Xi is free to document her hibernation for an upcoming art project; he sticks to the deal and spends six months providing food and other material goods for the narrator during her hibernation in exchange for her likeness, which he uses in a multimedia art show called “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman” (283). The show is presented at Ducat in July and is met with mixed reviews.

When the narrator emerges from her last Infermiterol blackout on June 1, she finds a note from Ping Xi, along with the expensive white fur coat she assumes she bought during a blackout. The note explains that Ping Xi had purchased the coat for her “simply because I wanted you to have it” (277). By the end of their collaboration, Ping Xi has proved to be a reliable collaborator.