Man Booker Shortlist: "Eileen" Review
Eileen Dunlop – the title character in “Eileen” by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press, 2015) – is hard to like. The book isn’t.
Moshfegh’s second novel (“McGlue,” 2014), short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, paints a vivid portrait of a disturbed and disturbing young woman, a character so well-drawn and creepy she burrows into the reader’s mind and won’t be excised. As the story unfolds, Moshfegh dials up the tension and suspense regarding Eileen’s future and fortunes. How will she EVER extricate herself from this hopeless existence?! What else can one expect from this taut and superbly written novel than a resolution as macabre as its heroine.
We know two pages in that Eileen survives her torturous childhood and young adulthood. She recounts her life in X-ville 50 years later, from the perspective of a septuagenarian who did escape and does appear to have had a satisfying albeit emotionally-unconventional life (how could she not?).
“There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then,” Eileen says. “I was someone else. I was Eileen. …I was young and fine, average, I guess. But at the time I thought I was the worst – ugly, disgusting, unfit for the world. …My last days as that angry little Eileen took place in late December, in the brutal cold town where I was born and raised.” Still, Eileen is so odd, so seemingly inert to improve her surroundings or her life that one initially feels a morbid fascination – rather than sympathy – for her. She keeps a frozen, dead mouse in the glove box of her dilapidated Dodge Coronet. She dresses in the outdated and too-large clothing of her deceased mother. She shoplifts. She is spiritually transformed by her bowel movements. She toys with the emotionally fragile mothers visiting their sons at the prison where she is a secretary. She has no friends, no career prospects, no normal familial relationships with her wild-thing older sister or alcoholic ex-cop father with whom she lives. You can’t call her his caretaker: She refuses to cook a meal or clean their squalid home. Her custodial duties consist of nightly trips to the liquor store for bottles of gin, locking his shoes in the trunk of her car so he must terrorize the neighborhood schoolchildren from the living room window, and, ultimately, taking possession of his police service weapon. Eileen’s situation isn’t entirely her fault. Growing up the second child of two alcoholic and emotionally abusive parents, Eileen left college after a year a half
“‘Care for’ is not quite the right way to say it. I was terrified of my mother … and by then I didn’t ‘care for’ her in the least. …There was nothing warm or caring about what I did.”
Eileen seems to lack a shred of compassion or love for anyone – even herself – except the hunky prison guard, Randy, about whom she fantasizes and regularly stalks. Eileen’s wormhole, her rabbit hole – her “sole shaft of light,” as one reviewer calls it – arrives in the form of the beautiful and sophisticated Rebecca Saint John, the new education director at the prison. Rebecca does transform Eileen, but not by giving her a girly makeover – new hairstyle, new clothes, new manners and voila your life is new and wonderful! Without giving anything away, Rebecca’s re-education theories are a bit irregular. In the end, it is Eileen, not Rebecca, who takes control, of the moment and the rest of her life.
“She was a strange woman, Rebecca was, and came into my life at an odd moment, just when I needed to run away from it the most. I could say more about her, but this is my story after all, not hers.”
