Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa bought a how-to book to write her first novel 

Eileen (2015) was Ottessa Moshfegh's first published novel. She followed it up three years later with the NYT best-seller My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I haven't read; but having read the reviews I know that it is about an alienated young woman who decides to try to sleep for a year after losing her job at an art gallery. Moshfegh is an excellent writer whose fiction explores the inner lives of misanthropic, unlikeable characters. 

Review

Eileen takes place over the course of the week leading up to Christmas 1962. The story is told retrospectively in the first person by the title character, Eileen Dunlop, from some fifty years in the future, when she is apparently living a better life under a different name. At the time of the story, Eileen is 24 years old, living at home with her father (an abusive, alcoholic ex-cop), and working as an assistant office administrator in a correctional institution for boys. Eileen had been taken out of her first year of college to come home and help out when her mother was dying. She never returned to college and now provides a modicum of care for her father, whom she hates. The "care" consists mostly of keeping him supplied with copious amounts of gin and making sure he doesn't wander around the neighborhood causing problems and eliciting visits from the police. (The old man, suffering from senile dementia and paranoid delusions, has a tendency, among other things, to point his service revolver threateningly at school children.) The approaching holiday plays little part in the events of the novel other than, perhaps, to emphasize the disaffection and squalid lives of the characters and provide a marker for Eileen's breakaway. 

If you're looking for a story with a plot, you'll be shit-out-of-luck with this one. The book consists entirely of Eileen's observations, obsessions, regrets, recriminations, delusions, and half-hearted future plans for about 220 pages. Then, a bit of a plot develops around 40 pages from the conclusion. It's this shift to a consequential sequence of events near the end of the novel that seems to have inspired some reviewers to compare the work to those of Hitchcock, Highsmith, and Jim Thompson, but nothing could be further from the truth. Eileen isn't a schemer or a psychopath; she's a lonely young woman looking for a way out of her desperate circumstances who ultimately seizes an opportunity with no idea what the next step will be. We gather from breadcrumbs dropped throughout the text that she will struggle for years and eventually find a comfortable place for herself in the world. (Earlier in the novel, in a bit of foreshadowing, she had noted the slogan "Per aspera ad astra" written on a pack of Pall Malls.) We don't learn anything about her later experiences, other than the fact that she eventually eliminates men from her life, but we gather that finding a peaceful, fulfilling existence is indeed possible even for someone like Eileen.

The narrative is almost unremittingly bleak, although punctuated here and there with bits of black humor. (I wonder if Moshfegh read Louis-Ferdinand Céline.) Having never had sex, Eileen fantasizes about it often in ways that are not at all constrained to the politically correct. It's an interesting journey if you're up for the challenge of spending a few days inside the head of a character who will often disgust you. The ending, however, doesn't quite live up to the promise offered by the final turn of events; so the novel ultimately feels unfulfilling.