Chronicle of isolation anything but settling

The unnamed narrator of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the new novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, is a wealthy, beautiful 20-something who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Depressed and disquieted, she detaches herself from life, spending the year 2000 sleeping as much as she can. To that end, she acquires a quack psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle who dispenses sleeping pills and other pharmaceuticals like candy.

The young woman inhales a variety of pills and retires to her bed, rousing only for occasional trips to the neighborhood bodega where she purchases meager supplies including coffee, chocolate milk and potato chips.

The novel — an often tedious saga whose humor is dark — progresses through the year of the title as a diary of retreat. It is the fictional antithesis of an embrace-life’s-challenges book such as Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.”

Although Moshfegh’s concept is inventive, it’s hard to identify with or feel symphony for her protagonist.

The young woman’s main claim for distress — told in flashbacks — is her relationship with her parents, her brilliant but distant scientist father and an even more distant, alcoholic mother, both of whom died when the woman was in college.

Beyond that, it’s difficult to feel the narrator’s pain at being so pretty and bright that people avoid her, not to mention her obsession with her abusive Wall Street boyfriend.

Aside from the hideous Trevor, the woman’s only companion is Reva, a needy young woman whose mother is dying of cancer.

Reva, the narrator argues, “was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain and with it, mine. Reva was • “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (Penguin, 304 pages, $26) by Ottessa Moshfegh is set for release on Tuesday.

like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted — my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.”

The novel finds the most humor in the outrageously inept and unethical Dr. Tuttle, a woman who can’t seem to remember her patients from one visit to the next. At their first meeting, the psychiatrist takes a brief history of the young woman and then hands her a “sheath of prescriptions.”

“’Don’t fill them all at once,’ she says. ‘We need to stagger them so as not to raise any red flags.’”

As the young woman’s year progresses, she experiences blackouts during which she leaves her apartment, does things and makes purchases she can’t remember. She decides to lock herself in, heightening her isolation and sleeping for even longer stretches of time.

Readers will not be surprised that the culmination of her year of rest and relaxation coincides with the most memorable date of 2001, Sept. 11.

Moshfegh’s novel is unsettling, difficult to read and a relief to finish. Yet it is strangely memorable, something of a drop-out horror tale.