Book Review: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

RACHEL SOO THOW - 5 APR 2021

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh was a novel that started off with elements of ‘Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine’ mixed with the mediocracies of an amateur psychological thriller. Yes, that’s a big stretch and an abundant claim to make, but let’s start from the beginning. At 24, our main character Eileen lives in Massachusetts with her alcoholic and verbally abusive father, who she attempts to care for yet unapologetically hates. Working as a secretary at a boys’ prison, Eileen lives out her day-to-day loathing her co-workers and imagining other-worldly experiences involving her crushes and deepest desires “cracking and darting through my breasts, splicing through the thick gristle of my shoulder like bullets or cleaving my brain into pieces.”

As the days become more and more monotonous and irritating, each page becomes increasingly dark and hilarious, and Moshfegh’s representation of Eileen almost depicts her as a character teetering between the villainous and the melodramatic. Within this, there seems to be a part of each and every one of us sitting and daydreaming of the possibilities and the ‘magic’ of imagination: Moshfegh has exposed us to a character with deep proportions, and one that has allowed us to uncover the perspective of a worldlier woman.

An unsettling feeling of consequence is scattered through this narrative. The ‘awfulness’ of Eileen’s life crackles through each page, giving rise to the nature of a woman’s relationship with her body. The disconnection between mind and body introduces issues of trust and respect, and the relationship of this to the male prerogative: “…at the time, I didn’t believe my body was really mine to navigate. I figured that was what men were for.” This aspect is particularly confronting and concerning, and one that I believe Moshfegh has uncovered about the female perspective: that female sexual desires have, in a way, been squashed and hidden due to the desire of man smothering them, and that women have been conditioned to believe that man is the determinant of their sexual satisfaction. Yet women are the concrete owners of the female body and soul.

Moshfegh writes beautifully and with prose that is witty, playful, sharp and fresh: through the mind of Eileen, we are thrown into a tension of wanting to experience her language and surroundings, yet on the other hand we are also wanting to give into our impulses and desires in order to race through the ‘saga’ to see what is to come.

Eileen becomes a character bathed in an ‘anti-hero’ representation, struggling with inner demons and sexual obsessions. As Moshfegh introduces Rebecca, a beautiful and charismatic teacher, onto the scene, Eileen’s affection for Rebecca propels us into a crime that, to be honest, could have been more compelling: “At first, yes, Rebecca was a dream to me, she was magic, she was powerful and everything I wanted to be.” The shock value is insufficiently exciting and unfortunately reads slightly disappointingly to me, as I truly believed in the development of an anti-heroine in the character of Eileen.

However, this novel is still entertaining and has many cringe-inducing moments, but perhaps this is what Moshfegh is really trying to portray: the reminder of how painful boredom truly is, and how a hunger for experience emerges to fulfil such dogmatic convictions of erotic desires. As much as this novel quickly moves downhill on the psychological thriller scale, the portrayal of Eileen is very close to the bitter taste of reality - our endless quest for love will always be vague and full of disappointment, and the only way to experience belief in the system is to search for others with similar strong convictions. We might not like this approach, but it’s unnervingly close to the one we live out.

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