Mind Picker: Eileen

I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life – the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.

When I was very upset, hot and shaking, I had a particular way of controlling myself. I found an empty room and grit my teeth and pinched my nipples while kicking the air like a cancan dancer until I felt foolish and ashamed. That always did the trick.

Got an idea of who Eileen Dunlop is yet? In the noirish, confessional Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, our unreliable narrator of a titular character will both overshare and obfuscate, temporise and titillate, deflect blame and defecate...perhaps I've gone too far...or perhaps not:

I was a shoplifter, a pervert, you might say, and a liar, of course, but nobody knew that. I would enforce the rules all the more, for didn't that prove I lived by a high moral code? That I was good? That I couldn't possibly want to hike up my skirt and move my runny bowels all over the linoleum floor?

But who is Eileen Dunlop? By the end of the first chapter, the reader understands that Eileen is now an old woman, recalling the events from fifty years earlier (in 1964) when she was twenty-four that forced her to flee her unhappy home in an unnamed town (she refers to it as X-ville) in coastal Massachusetts. Throughout the book, Eileen spends most of the time describing her own failings – primarily her obsessions with her body and its every odour and excretion – and her wretched homelife – with a dead mother, an alcoholic bully for a father, and a loose older sister who fled the scene at seventeen – and over everything, frequent hints are dropped that all is about to change and escape will soon be Eileen's only option. Steady foreshadowing made the slow unspooling nearly excruciating, and while the big climax when it finally comes is a tad ridiculous and disappointing (even the name of the key character, Rebecca Saint John, seemed cartoonish), I can't say I was totally disappointed in the end: Eileen is not so much about the what as the who and the how: and these elements were incredibly well-wrought.

A few days later my mother died, and I let the tears flow openly at last. It's a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I've gone over it again and again for years whenever I've felt it necessary or useful to cry.

As a reader, I never forgot that I was listening to a story as told from an old woman's memory and that any inconsistencies were the narrator's alone: Eileen may say that she hated and was disgusted by her father for being an alcoholic, but then include memories where she is drinking the vermouth she kept hidden in her work locker, or joining the old man for an evening of drunken camaraderie, or waking up beside the pool of her own vomit where she passed out in the car; Eileen may note that the immediate girl-crush she felt for the glamourous Rebecca didn't mean that these were “lesbian” feelings, but later admit, that in a moment of head-to-head conspiring, if Rebecca had tried to lean in and kiss her, she would have “gone along”. The degree to which Eileen thinks she's being totally honest (primarily by confessing to embarrassing or deplorable thoughts and actions) makes for many nicely ironic moments when her actions don't match her overall memory of herself as a young woman, and it's hard to conclude that Eileen wasn't completely nuts (but I remember feeling a bit nutty myself as a young woman).

As a virgin who can't stop staring at men's crotches and imagining what lay beneath the layers of cotton (initially she says that she's seen a penis in her father's porn mags, but later admits that the male parts were merely “inferred”), she suffers bodice-ripping fantasies, stating, Being kidnapped was something of a secret wish of mine. At least then I'd know that I mattered to someone, that I was of value and in an unrelated passage, I’d always believed that my first time would be by force. Of course I hoped to be raped by only the most soulful, gentle, handsome of men, somebody who was secretly in love with me. Eileen spends much time fantasising about running away from her father, about how he'd panic and have his buddies on the police force scouring the state for her, and it's perhaps the saddest part of the book that even though she left crime in her wake, no one did come looking for her; no one found her anyways in all those years. And there's something pathetically immature in the old woman's storytelling – like using the pseudonym “Moorehead” for the boys' prison she worked at because that was the name of a landlord she later didn't like – and it achieves the trick of providing amateurish storytelling (by the narrator) that displays deft technical skill (by the author).

Moshfegh captured many moments of truth (and dark humour) in this portrayal of an emotionally stunted and damaged woman – truth regarding both her actions in the past and her present psyche; Eileen may have escaped X-ville, going on to enjoy her adult life, but she never really got over that terrible childhood – and discovering these nuggets of truth are the reason I read. On the other hand, the plot doesn't really pay off; made doubly disappointing because the early parts made me think I had found something really special. As an aside: with all of the bad girl characters in fiction lately – think Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, I Let You Go – Eileen is the first book in this loose category that really gets into why the bad girl acts the way she does. And while those other three books may have better succeeded plotwise, it's not incidental that Eileen is the one that got on the Man Booker longlist; character must trump plot where one of these elements is weak. I could go either way between three and four stars, and I'm considering this a generous rounding up.