Eileen might seem an odd choice to take on a summer holiday. It’s set in a wintry New England town in the days leading up to Christmas Eve and features the miserable life of a narrator who seems intent on being unlikeable. It got into my luggage for my trip to Scotland purely because it was the book picked that month from my TBR Book Jar.
The unseasonal setting actually wasn’t an issue since I’ve never intentionally matched my reading to the season. Nor have I ever bought into the idea of “beach reads” — the lists of recommended books that come out at this time of the year seem to assume people lose half their brain cells whenever they set foot on a beach and can cope only with “light reading”. How patronising is that???
That’s enough blathering on about seasonal reading. Time I got back to the real point of this post — my thoughts on Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel.
Eileen features the kind of direct narratorial voice I enjoy. It comes this time in the shape of Eileen Dunlop, a 24-year-old, who works as a secretary at Moorhead, a correctional facility for juvenile offenders. Home is a shambolic, dirty house shared with an alcoholic father whose idea of parental love is telling his daughter how plain and friendless she is and will never amount to much.
Despite the barbs, Eileen doesn’t want him to come to harm. She just wants him to change “to be good to me, apologize for the half decade of grief he’d given me.” In the meantime, she dutifully nips out to the store whenever he runs out of booze and hides his shoes in the boot of her car to stop him roaming around the streets, infuriating the neighbours by sleeping in their porches and using their gardens as urinals.
I was an adult. I knew that. I had no curfew. There were no official house rules. There were only my father’s arbitrary rages, and when he was in one he would only relax if I agreed to whatever odd, humiliating punishment he came up with. He’d bar me from the kitchen, order me to walk to Lardner’s and back in the rain. The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside my daughterly duties.
We know within the first few pages, that this situation doesn’t last. Eileen’s story is told in retrospect 50 years after a dramatic event caused her to flee from home, never to return. She gives a day by day account leading up to her flight on Christmas Eve, intersecting this linear narrative with commentary about her home life, her dress sense (non existent) and attitude to personal hygiene (minimal).
Her life seems destined to be one of endless rounds of self loathing and resentment, relieved only by a fantasy about a dishy prison guard called Randy whom she begins to stalk. Things take a turn for the better when Rebecca Saint John, a new counsellor at Moorehead, begins to take an interest in Eileen.
Now Eileen might think this is the start of a true friendship but we readers are more savvy and can guess this isn’t going to end well. Rachel is attractive, stylish and
smart so what she sees in dowdy, smelly Eileen is a mystery. It’s not until almost the end of the book that we get to discover what calamity that ensues from this relationship.
As a mystery story, Eileen doesn’t really work — there is too much foreshadowing and not enough of a pay off. But as a character study, it’s excellent because Eileen is simultaneously a sympathetic figure and one who is repellant. It’s hard not to feel sorry for someone whose life is such a mess and who clutches the one chance of happiness that comes her way, however misplaced that might be. But her personal habits are impossible to overlook and she’s downright creepy at times. I doubt any reader will warm to her but she’s certainly someone who is hard to forget.
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