Essays

On Tao Lin’s “Shoplifting From American Apparel” and Ottessah Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”

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Eugenia Breton

There is a surprisingly robust literary sub-genre centering on over-educated, unlikable young millennials of unexamined privilege somehow able to afford an apartment in New York City, despite being unemployed, depressed, and addicted to pharmaceuticals. Probably the two premier examples of this odd genre are Tao Lin’s 2009 novella Shoplifting From American Apparel and Ottessah Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

The former is a reproduction of Gchat conversations between two listless young writers, who compare notes on their Xanax addictions and the strippers they shamelessly live off. They attempt to shoplift from the instantly-dated, 2000s-internet-meme American Apparel; not out of desperation or economic necessity mind you, but solely for the petty thrill of it. Nevertheless, they fail, are caught and arrested. The novella has the virtue of being short, because it is otherwise devoid of insight, character growth, plot, poetry, or point. It was published by Melville House, a self-described “activist,” left-leaning indie-press, which is ironic, because Shoplifting From American Apparel is highly unlikely to impel anyone to action on any front.

The latter, meanwhile, concerns a depressed and unemployed young college grad living off a wealthy inheritance in 2001 New York City after the deaths of both her parents. She is naturally thin and pretty and has a wardrobe full of designer clothes–much to the envy of Reva, an old college friend who regularly drops in to check on her.

The unnamed protagonist is openly contemptuous of Reva, despite the fact that Reva actually has to work for a living, is being taken advantage of sexually by her boss, and whose mother is dying too. The novel has the virtue of at least featuring actual character growth, as the protagonist slowly learns to care about Reva, even as the latter understandably grows distant from her. The novel ends (as all New York novels set in 2001 must) with 9/11, as the protagonist buys a VCR to record the event, convinced that Reva is the woman falling from the North Tower that morning. Yet though she has learned to regret taking her friend for granted, there is never a moment wherein she, say, decides to sell all that she has and give it to the poor, or advocate for universal mental health services, or just actually do something–like, in general–let alone do something for someone else.

(Side note: are we ever going to get a decent 9/11 novel? Between this, Foer’s schmaltzy Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Pynchon’s disappointing Bleeding Edge, I think the answer is gonna be no. Perhaps the event simply resists all representation.)

Obviously I’m not a fan of either of these texts. Call them anti-picaresque novels, if you will–where instead of featuring the comic misadventures of young lower-class scamps surviving in early modernity, they instead feature the depressed non-adventures of young upper-class scamps surviving in postmodernity.

Or perhaps there’s nothing remotely modern about these texts at all! “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity” declared Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, a sentiment that both these novels seem to share. Yet even Ecclesiastes at least ends with a sort of resolution: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” For that matter, all previous generations of lazy discontents–whether in the 1990 Gen X film Slackers, or the Hippies of the ’60s, or Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or Huck and Jim floating down the Missouri River, or Walt Whitman “loafing at his leisure”–all at least seemed to be expressing some sort of overt discontent and resistance against the systems of oppression that would exploit and abuse us. Neither Lin nor Moshfegh, though, ever seem to rise to even that level of self-awareness.

But here’s where I at least attempt to have a charitable reading, as to just why they are so paralyzed into inaction. Both Paul and Mormon said that if we have not charity, we are nothing–and Rita Felski in 2015’s The Limits of Critique also argues that, rather than training English majors to solely interrogate systems of oppression complicit within out texts (to clarify: she never says we should stop teaching that, only that maybe it shouldn’t be the only thing we teach), we should instead help our students pin down what makes these texts so meaningful to them in the first place.

Because both these texts were widely-reviewed and developed strong cult-followings upon publication (I mean, shoot, My Year of Rest and Relaxation actually got picked up by Penguin); that seems to indicate they resonated with a surprisingly wide audience. And it is here that I recall an essay once posted to this very site, “Keep Mormonism Weird,” which cited 2021’s “Mormonism’s Sci-Fi Swan Song” by essayist Andrew Kay, a non-member who happened to attend the very last Hill Cumorah pageant just before COVID-19 shut it down for good.

Surprisingly, he describes the production–which even I found vaguely cringe and embarrassing the one time I watched it in high school–in unexpectedly laudatory terms: “People found themselves in a Copernican universe far vaster and more impersonal than the biblical heavens, and one way to react to this new normal was to discover in space itself — its stars and planets and imagined denizens — the stuff of religious awe. So in science fiction, the wonder and terror long inspired by the Judeo-Christian God, and by angels and devils, gets remapped onto aliens; visitations become visitors. In Mormonism, God is an alien; we are all incipient aliens, bound up in a project of collective deification.”

As Kay himself notes, “What did I or my friends — secular, overeducated, climate-terrified yet basically inert — have to rival that?”

And indeed, the protagonists of Shoplifting from American Apparel and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are likewise secular (there is no mention of religion anywhere in these texts–not even to refute or debunk it), over-educated, not only climate-terrified but everything terrified in our cold and apparently-meaningless cosmos, yet nevertheless also “basically inert.” They don’t even want to parlay their psychological paralysis into any sort of system of resistance or philosophy, because that would also be a lie they tell themselves.

It’s one thing, then, for me to lambast these characters as entitled, privileged, lazy, and unlikable; but the real question is what to do about this profound generational ennui in the first place. These terrible questions, not-incidentally, are what the Gospel is supposed to address. The Book of Mormon is about a pair of ancient American civilizations that completely self-destruct due to their failure to address these terrible questions. The modern Americans in these two book are at least not engaging in mutually assured genocide like the Nephites and Jaredites; but, to paraphrase the Savior, we will all likewise perish if we do not repent.

I keep hearing about Church retention problems with today’s youth. But I can’t help but reflect that if we can’t figure out how to adapt the Gospel to inspire and address the profound listlessness and depression of the current generation, then that is very much an us problem, not a them problem.

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