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This article argues that three contemporary novels – Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion (2014), Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room (2017), and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) – offer correctives to prevalent histories of the American 1990s that depict this period as a time of stability, tolerance, and optimism. These novels offer specific vectors of critique, attending to the advance of social and cultural forms of neoliberalism, popular notions of the "alternative" or liberal 90s, and address a sequence of ruptures and social turbulence preceding "9/11" – often seen as the abrupt conclusion of the "long 90s." Additionally, the historical narratives of these novels each build in depictions of the September 11 attacks, which decenter them and question the exceptionalization of this event. I argue for the value in reading these novels together and demonstrate how they speak to and mirror each other in productive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an important countertradition in U. S.-American literature that goes against intense feelings and instead highlights apathy, unfeeling and disaffection. As a few scholars from affect studies have recently argued, apathy can signal a "detachment from attachments to hegemonic structures of feeling" and holds "the potential for striving toward a radical politics of liberation" (Yao 2021: 17). Literary texts that highlight apathy formally and thematically thus reflect on broader socio-political contexts of emotional withdrawal that was caused, for example, by labor fatigue, late capitalism and addiction, and pose a challenge to the affective status quo. One recent text that stages this complex dance between feeling and unfeeling is Ottessa Moshfegh's 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In this article I argue that Moshfegh's novel complicates the apathetic protagonist's naïve goal of re-affection – that is, her attempt to overcome apathy, find happiness and reintegrate into society – by embedding her emotional experiences within an overpowering affective economy that is constituted by media, capitalism, neoliberalism and other socio-political forces. Instead of 'correcting' the affective pendulum from a solipsistic apathy into a naïve happiness, Moshfegh's novel 'awakens' her readers to a more complex and undetermined spectrum of affective structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation tells a story of doing nothing; it is an antinovel whose heroine attempts to sleep for a year in order to lose track of time. This desire to lose track of time constitutes a refusal of plot, a satiric and passive-aggressive rejection of the kinds of narrative sequences that novels typically employ but that, Moshfegh implies, offer nothing but accommodation to an unhealthy late capitalist society. Yet the effort to stifle plot is revealed, paradoxically, as an ambition to be achieved through plot, and so in resisting what novels do, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends up showing us what novels do. Being an antinovel turns out to be just another way of being a novel; in seeking to lose track of time, the novel attunes us to our being in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]