Self-diagnosis is a dangerous thing, especially when you’re doing it for your mind. Eileen confesses to being naive, neurotic, and self-obsessed in her younger days, but adds that she’s “much better now”. Yet, in delicious hints throughout the book, we find that she is changed, not “fixed”.
In Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh, the older Eileen takes us back to her younger days, when she was in a small New England town, working as a secretary at a juvenile boys’ prison, and lived with her increasingly-demented father after her mother passed away.
The younger Eileen does not enjoy her job much, she tells us in hindsight, and she was unhappy about her relationship with her father. Only her neurotic attitude of being self-absorbed kept her in her place. She has a secret crush, one of the guards in the prison. And she spends her evenings going to liquor shops to get drinks for her father (or maybe stalking the guard, or maybe shoplifting). Sometime around Christmas of that year, she tells us, something happened that broke the pattern. She left her life behind, ran away to New York, and “began a new life”. What was that unusual incident? That’s the mystery that keeps us going in this deliciously nuanced noir.
Our narrator is not exactly reliable, though she tries her hardest to be believed. Her decision to tell the story is suspected, and the things she lays the most stress on are strange, to say the least. Take, for example, her decision of where to start her story. She begins with a normal working day in December.
Through this day, she manages visitors to the inmates, gawps at the guards, sneers at the other two ladies in her departments, and comes home to a drunk and unbalanced father. And she thinks about taking a bath. Nothing special happens, really—and then she confesses to having chosen this day at random to begin her tale!
Described at its bare bones, Eileen’s life is ordinary. But through the eyes of its narrator, it becomes ominous and larger-than-life. Every small thing—from a smashed window of a car, to icicles accumulating on a portico—acquires some significance. We know some of these things will be red herrings, but we don’t mind speculating on their significance if Eileen finds them worth mentioning in such detail. And we anxiously await the point when things will go wrong.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a true successor to Patricia Highsmith in creating not-quite-right characters, and then putting us in their heads. Through an accumulation of foreshadowings, we are led to the core of the mystery. Somewhere down the line the heroine will be involved in an infatuation, a possible murder, kidnapping, child abuse, but it all sneaks up on you so smoothly you’re taken by surprise (yes, you will be, even though you’ve read this review). And we actually, guiltily, cheer for her through it all.
Eileen was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and most summaries of the contenders described it as a literary thriller. I’d lean towards the first part of that dual description—in her choice of words, in her evocation of the neurosis induced by insular small-town life, Moshfegh captures a type of personality not often seen in fiction. Through her choice of narrative mechanism—the older version talking about her past—she adds an understated character evolution to the plot. This story is not the end, Eileen seems to say. Many adventures followed.We’re on for the ride.