Rating:

Alcoholism, Laxative Purges, and Maybe an Eventual Scandal

Author: Ottessa Moshfegh

Living alone with her alcoholic, demented father, Eileen is both caretaker and jailer and, in turn, she is also confined. She is imprisoned by her own outsider nature, both the nature that she affects and the one that she has been given by uncaring parents and a dead-hearted town. As a young woman, Eileen is well down the road of alcoholism herself, working by day as a secretary at a corrupt prison for boys. Eileen is defined by her bodily shame – an intense focus on her looks, her secretions (you don’t EVEN want to know about the laxatives), and her burgeoning yet repressed desires. She is in turns hateful and perverted and at other times someone to be pitied: a broken soul who never had a chance or experienced kindness.

Set against a dreary New England winter, Eileen tells the story of what catalyzed this lonesome woman to leave this town, this repressed and constrictive life. It’s a circular story, one that promises fast action in the space of one week, when a new friendship is made and a crime committed, yet the story itself is more introspection and memory than linear telling. Readers will either love the despicable depths of such a convoluted character alongside her own selfish naval gazing, or utterly hate the deliberately disgusting segues and lack of story. I fell in the later camp.

I wanted to like Eileen (both book and character.) It was my book club selection after all. It promised a mystery and thriller. It had an old car on a black and white cover, and a lot of reviewers threw around terms like “brooding” and “Hitchcockian.” But despite my best attempts, I could barely finish this book.

Eileen is a character that will engender some basic human sympathy. Her parents were awful, both to each other and to her, and the town cares deeply about her crazed and abusive father, yet never reaches out to her, a young woman trapped with this aging, cruel old man. Yet Eileen herself, telling this story as an older woman reflecting, admits that her own selfishness was off-putting, that she was so tied into her own story as to have no sympathy for those going through something worse (like the boys in the prison). Yet . . . yet, this intellectual knowledge doesn’t excuse a character. It doesn’t help that Eileen’s body dysmorphia and ruminations on her body, along with weirdly sexualized language meant to churn the stomach, take over most of the narrative. She tries to make herself disgusting, and she does succeed. Talk of no showers, of constant laxative purges, of peeing in cups in the attic . . . yeah, it’s not endearing. This is not the kind of book you can read while snacking, that’s for sure.

Image by Aidar Aimichev from Pixabay

And so, Eileen herself is not a character we can muster much emotion for, beyond the basic knowledge that we should feel some sadness for someone so outside, so lonely. The other characters in the book are little better. All of them are self-centered, usurious, hateful, set against a grey background of winter sludge and sordid longings.

And then, there is the promise followed by the slowness and the decided anticlimax. From the beginning, there is a sense of breathlessness with lots of “that was the last time I ever” and “if only I knew I would never see such-and-such again,” leading us to believe that something was about to happen. But it doesn’t, dear reader, until nearly the very end of the book. We’ve had so many false promises of impending action by Eileen, including things like “but enough about so-and-so, I won’t mention them again” only for old so-and-so to crop up a thousand more times. Will nothing ever happen but Eileen spending delirium filled hours in the bathroom and hiding herself in her mother’s discarded clothes? Will anyone in this book, for example, take a shower or stop drinking for one damn minute? And for the love of God will someone get some bleach and some scrubbing brushes and just clean everything!

When the end does come, we’re not given the promised build up. It just happens. It’s better than nothing. There are some answers, but in the very moment that we want Eileen to slow down and paint the scene, she suddenly discovers how to summarize and be succinct. Bad timing.

Overall, I see why people like this book. There are lots of things for a book club to deconstruct and it is a character study of sorts. But ultimately, the emperor here forgot his clothes (probably during a drinking binge/laxative purge). There is a lot of artistry here, but it fails to hide the lack of ultimate substance and story. Not recommended. I’m honestly not even sure I’ll try this author again despite the “mystery” and “thriller” tags associated with her name. This was a fun book to dissect in a book club, but a tedious and joyless one to actually read.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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