Eileen - Wyrms.de

Hardcover, 260 pages

English language

Published Aug. 18, 2015 by Penguin Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-59420-662-7
OCLC Number:: 910867011

(1 review)

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a …

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.

1 edition

V171 reviewed Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Goodreads Review of Eileen, by Otessa Moshfegh

4 stars

Classic Moshfegh, Eileen is an atmospheric tale of addiction, obsession, and depressing delusion. We follow Eileen, a young 24 year old living in New England, living and caring for her retired, alcoholic ex-cop father who has nothing but disdain for her. The story is recounted by an older Eileen, telling the reader what led her to "escape from X-ville," her home town she disliked so much, she wouldn't deign to share its actual name. Eileen works in a juvenile detention center, managing the visits between the boys and their mothers. Her life is wholly unremarkable and her time is spent in toxic introspection, hyper focusing on her lack of self worth and desirability, obsessive vanity but without self awareness, enabling her father's alcoholism, and accepting all of his verbal abuse day after day. We get hints of her pathological obsessiveness when we learn that she regularly stalks one of the …

Classic Moshfegh, Eileen is an atmospheric tale of addiction, obsession, and depressing delusion. We follow Eileen, a young 24 year old living in New England, living and caring for her retired, alcoholic ex-cop father who has nothing but disdain for her. The story is recounted by an older Eileen, telling the reader what led her to "escape from X-ville," her home town she disliked so much, she wouldn't deign to share its actual name. Eileen works in a juvenile detention center, managing the visits between the boys and their mothers. Her life is wholly unremarkable and her time is spent in toxic introspection, hyper focusing on her lack of self worth and desirability, obsessive vanity but without self awareness, enabling her father's alcoholism, and accepting all of his verbal abuse day after day. We get hints of her pathological obsessiveness when we learn that she regularly stalks one of the guard at the boy's prison who she doesn't even necessarily like, but because he is a man she has proximity to, she yearns for his approval and desire.

This all changes when Rebecca's starts at work. A new director of education brought in to teach the prisoners, Rebecca is seemingly everything Eileen wants to be, chic, elegant, witty, and sharp. For some reason, Rebecca takes a liking to Eileen and they spend time getting to know each other as Elieen's obsession shifts to focus solely on Rebecca. This results in a climactic, violent outcome.

Moshfegh is an expert at crafting the most pitiable, unlikable characters imaginable, but makes them more pathetic than they are bad, so you can't help but to feel sorry for them. For main characters, this makes them compelling to follow. For side characters, it can be a bit of a chore reading about how irredeemable they usually are. The pacing of this story was strange. Narrator Eileen often hinted to the climax that was coming, but the climax ended up happening within the last 25 pages, making the end feel rushed. In fact, considering this story is really about Eileen's obsession with Rebecca, I was surprised to see that Rebecca doesn't even enter the story until about half way through the book, with the first half setting the scene for Eileen's sad, Sisyphean life. Aside from the rushed ending, this didn't really bother me because I enjoyed the whole story, but I was surprised that it took so long to get to the central plot of the story for a rather short book.

There were a few moments of disgusting depravity here, but it was no Lapvona. I was expecting worse, but not necessarily hoping for it. Check the trigger warnings before picking this up though. If you like Moshfegh's other works, you'll love this even if it feels a bit tame in comparison.

Subjects

Fathers and daughters
Prisons / Fiction
Prisons
Fathers and daughters / Fiction
Fiction