Eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh
Penguin Press
2015
Ms. Hen decided to read this because she learned about it a
while ago, and was curious about it. She likes to read about disturbed young
women; this is one of her favorite subjects in literature, to read as well as
to write. EILEEN is about such a character.
Eileen Dunlop works in a boys’ prison, and takes care of her
alcoholic father. Going between the two places she despises everything about
herself and her life. She is twenty-four and the year is 1964. She tells the
story looking back at her life from the present day; since this is the
narrative, Ms. Hen knew she survived in the end.
Eileen shoplifts, and fantasizes and stalks the handsome,
young prison guard Randy. She supplies her father with liquor, and imbibes
herself at times with him. She rarely showers and does not eat healthy
food. She is an unlikeable, but
pitiful woman. Ms. Hen likes her, however. She likes her because she
understands her and she knows she is realistic. Ms. Hen read some reviews of
this book, and people wrote that Eileen is a despicable character, which is
unusual for a female protagonist. It’s typically men who are portrayed as monsters, but
Ms. Hen is glad that now there is equal opportunity and women can be depicted
as truly bad characters in fiction as well.
It’s not that Eileen wants to be bad. It’s her life
circumstances that make her that way. Her mother died young, and her sister is
a loose, unkind woman, and Eileen is stuck with her father who treats her like
garbage. So it’s no wonder Eileen acts like a pariah, and dreams of
escaping her situation.
Things change for Eileen when she meets Rebecca, the new
teacher at the prison. Rebecca appears to be everything Eileen is not:
beautiful, educated, poised, charming. Eileen is fascinated with Rebecca, but
in the end, she becomes Eileen’s downfall. They end up accomplices in a crime,
and since the story is told from Eileen’s older point of view, the reader
already knows something horrific will happen because the narrator reveals it
ahead of time.
This novel reminds Ms. Hen of two different books which take
place in time periods surrounding this: GIRL, INTERRUPTED, in the late Sixties and
THE BELL JAR, in the Fifties. This novel seems to be caught in the middle of
those two worlds, the venue of lost girls who cannot seem to find their way out
of the dark. GIRL, INTERRUPTED is a memoir, and THE BELL JAR is based on Sylvia
Plath’s real life, but even though EILEEN is not based on anyone’s life, it seems
as if it is drawn from these two books. The difference is that Eileen does not
end up in a psychiatric hospital, she commits a crime and runs away, but the
feeling and the emotions are the same. The world is a fucked up place, and
there’s nothing we can do about it, is the lesson Ms. Hen gleaned from all three books. But
Eileen ends up happy in her life when she’s older, she says in the book. This
novel might offer some hope to young women who think there is no way out.
Eileen’s family does not eat that much, but there are a
couple of mentions of chickens, which pleased Ms. Hen. She talks about
Christmas, “Back in X-ville, Dunlop dinners had been at best dry chicken,
mashed potatoes from a box, canned beans, limp bacon. Christmas was a little
different. A store bought sponge cake was all I remember eating from year to
year. The Dunlops were never big eaters.” And also, Eileen talks about taking care of her mother, “ 'I should be dead already,’
she insisted. I dutifully boiled the chicken soup on the stove, day in, day out
and brought her the clear broth in a green salad bowl big enough to catch the
spills…”
Ms. Hen thinks this book is disturbing, but she loved it.
She likes reading something that is unusual. This book is not perfect, but it’s
dark enough to mirror the bleakness and reality of life.
