Eileen

Eileen is one of the most twisted and unconventional literary heroines I’ve ever read. Behind her quiet demeanor and dull face hides her mind, which is like a killer’s, always furious and seething.

While working at a juvenile correctional facility, Eileen meets Rebecca, another key character far removed from most women of their generation. Seductive and deceitful, Rebecca cajoles Eileen into joining her act of crime–a violent, underhanded plan to restore her idea of justice. 

Gritty, shocking at times, and utterly winning, Moshfegh’s novel has the form of a well-wrought thriller, but it is so much more.

It’s a character study, one grimly amusing in its oh-so-granular depiction of a down-and-out life, yet it is, too, all the while, riveting in its lethal and inevitable escalation. It’s surprising. Twists ahead. Told through Moshfegh’s narrator, Eileen, who has survived her ordeal, it allows the reader to—somewhat comfortably—navigate what could have been, otherwise, a too-muchness. In the end, it’s all Eileen, our un-plucky bulimic heroine, who delivers the final blow.

Getting a reader engaged with an unlikeable protagonist is a challenge to any novelist.

Moshfegh succeeds brilliantly here. Eileen is as unlikeable as they come, an angry, friendless young woman who hates herself and everyone else. She works in a reprehensible, small-town prison for juvenile offenders and shares a squalid house with her nasty father.

Suddenly, though, a lovely young woman joins the prison staff. To Eileen’s amazement, she befriends her. Within days, she also involves her in a violent crime. Does this sound grim? Repellant? It’s not.

Granted, Eileen isn’t a book to be read over lunch. But the… show more.

Moshfegh’s narrator declares in the book’s very first paragraph: “I hated almost everything,” and states soon after that she is “ugly, disgusting, unfit for this world.”

Completely preoccupied with her body—the way it looks as well as its functions, which are depicted in great detail—she is trapped in her small existence with no thought of escape until the introduction of a mysterious stranger and the unfurling of a crime.

But the crime plot becomes background to the finely wrought character study: a self-absorbed and obsessive woman on the brink of self-discovery and independence.

Moshfegh’s first novel opens with the narrator “very unhappy and angry all the time.” She is the sinister version of SNL’s Mary Catherine Gallagher, unflinchingly honest, acerbically observant, self-absorbed, and in love with her own nastiness. “Didn’t she know I was a monster, a creep, a crone? How dare she mock me with courtesy when I deserved to be greeted with disgust and dismay?” Though she becomes obsessed with beautiful Rebecca, it’s the caustic Eileen we can’t look away from, no matter how much we might want to.

In her debut novel, Moshfegh explores the dark corners of 24-year-old Eileen Dunlop’s disturbed mind with gorgeous prose. The narrator, an older and more self-aware Eileen, traces her younger self’s complex relationship with her alcoholic father and a dead-end job at all boys’ prison. She is self-loathing, transgressive, and deeply human. When she meets Rebecca St. John, an attractive and cheerful new counselor, she becomes enchanted with her, a bit of light in the darkness. Ultimately, it’s a novel about how far we’ll go to escape both a bad situation and, even more chillingly, ourselves.