Why Ottessa Moshfegh Is One of the Best Novelists of the Summer

An unnamed young woman--blond, beautiful, a graduate of Columbia University--hates everything and everyone in shiny, brittle Manhattan, circa 2000. So she decides to hibernate in her Upper East Side apartment for six months. Maybe, she thinks, if she sleeps all that time--with the help of an enabling psychiatrist and the medications she prescribes--she will wake to find purpose and pleasure in living.