Eileen is about a girl and her grand escape from her hometown where she was born and raised and spent most of her youth, being unhappy and neglected by her parents, always thinking less of herself, concocting up vivid imaginary situations that would make her feel important. She grew up in a dysfunctional family, and as almost always with the kids of such families, Eileen grew up a little off. Different from her peers in many ways that you wouldn’t know just by looking. The first person to see that she was a bit “different” just happened to be this eccentric young woman, who has issues of her own. May be it is because of that very reason, that Rebecca, the new (I already forgot what her post had been at the juvenile detention center that Eileen worked at, but if memory serves, she had been some sort of…) educational guidance counselor to the young prisoners, sought to take Eileen into her confidence. Eileen, on the other hand, was so distracted and, in search of a more appropriate word, enamored by her, who is the complete opposite of Eileen that she was ready to do anything to feel important, find a friend, akin to a lover almost, in Rebecca.
Eileen’s strange attraction to Rebecca is understandable; considering Rebecca was everything Eileen only dreamed to be. Rebecca was tall, Eileen short. Rebecca was beautiful, Eileen not (at least that’s what Eileen believed, that she was ugly.) Rebecca went to Harvard, Eileen had to quit college when her mother fell sick. Rebecca was wealthy, Eileen was not. Rebecca was confident, Eileen was not, and so on. In retrospect, it just may be that almost the entire book was devoted to a character study of a sort, of Eileen, which essentially attempts to explain Eileen’s attachment to Rebecca, and eventually the dire consequences of this attraction.
Speaking of, this book had the longest intro I have ever read in any book I have come across. Was it necessary? Perhaps, but I am not convinced. The intro, if you will, spanned almost three quarters of the entire book, and truth be told, I feel like it could have been easily cut into half and still manage to get the message across. But if Moshfegh were to do that, the book would have been half the size of it’s already short length of only 270-ish pages. However, all that said, it is still a very good debut novel in my honest opinion. Eileen was creepy alright. May be not quite as much as I’d have liked, but still, creepy. And with time, I can only hope for the author’s skills to sharpen. I cannot wait to see what Ms. Moshfegh will bring us next.
Have you read any of the Man Booker 2016 longlisted books? If so, which ones? And if not, do you plan on reading them?
Title: Eileen
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Publisher: Penguin Press, August 18, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 272 pages.
Genre: Historial Fiction, Literary Fiction, Crime
Source: University of Denver Library