Few people’s inner lives are interesting enough to chronicle moment by moment. There’s laundry. Bathroom time. Petty insecurity. Long subway rides. Yet Ottessa Moshfegh hasn’t just walked the literary tightrope that is the existential novel: she’s cartwheeled across. Her new book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is an odyssey of consciousness from the perspective of an alienated young woman in the cultural candy store that is turn-of-the-21st-century New York. Moshfegh’s performance is all the more impressive because the protagonist she invented is so unlikely.