Maybe the main achievement here is that Moshfegh’s managed to produce a funny, acerbic and captivating novel from both a heroine we ought to hate (a rich kid bored with the life of plenty) and a plot that’s almost tautologically sedate (nap after blackout after nap after blackout).

But of course it doesn’t go quite to plan some trial medication sends her into worrying blackouts and soon she’s feeling worse, rather than better… So she finds a crank therapist who’ll prescribe her whatever she demands, she stocks up on pharmaceuticals, and she begins to sleep in earnest: this is her Year of Rest and Relaxation, a cocoon from which she’ll emerge a better, happier person.

And she reckons she can do that if she sleeps enough. She hates everything, from her job and her colleagues in a pretentious modern art gallery, to her best friend Reva (whose own mother is dying who wants her friend’s money and looks and apparently easy life) a Holden Caulfield for the twenty-first century, sick of the phonies, she wants to start over, to wipe her whole life, her whole self, clean. So we’re in New York, pre-9/11, and our narrator, a Columbia graduate and an orphan (her father died from cancer her mother OD’d on booze and prescription meds), is financially booming (a healthy inheritance) and emotionally bust. Think Alexandra Kleeman meets Lena Dunham meets the kids from Less Than Zero, only in NYC, with a much weirder shrink. It’s not many months since we reviewed Moshfegh’s debut story collection, and now here’s her third novel (though the first, McGlue, is more of a novella, and didn’t generate much interest here in the UK), and it turns out to be as skew-whiff a tale of a messed-up eccentric as any of the stories in Homesick for Another World.

My year of rest and relaxation art