Eileen

It is 1964, and Eileen lives alone with her verbally abusive alcoholic father in a small town in Massachusetts. Underfed, embittered, and lonely, she has never felt loved or appreciated by anyone, until the arrival of a new colleague, Rebecca, at the (literal) prison where she works. From a vantage point some years in the future, she narrates what she tells us is the last week she spent living the identity with which she was born.

This book owes a lot to Highsmith, and Eileen is evocative (I’ll stop short of saying derivative) of a Highsmith protagonist, in that we can all pretty much see that she’s a psychopath in the making. Likewise, Rebecca’s toxic glamour hints at du Maurier, and she has a similarly dazzling effect on Eileen to that of her namesake on the second Mrs de Winter. Moshfegh does, it must be said, a pretty great job of normalizing Eileen’s responses to the dreadfully depressing world through which she moves: it takes a while, after you close the book, to remember that not everyone who has a sad childhood turns into a monster. There is a feminist strand running through the novel that rebels against 1960s norms, and I can’t decide whether it was unnecessary or not: clearly the sexist values of the time contributed to who Eileen was and became, but at times the emphasis seemed out of place, and detracted from the psychological punch.

Is this a good book? I can’t say otherwise, and evidently the Booker committee thinks so. As a work of psychological observation it’s acute; as a novel, perfectly-structured; as a piece of prose, solid but not brilliant. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but then it’s not a genre I’m much attracted to, and my lack of enjoyment is nothing to do with the quality of the work.

Trigger warnings: child sexual assault, general violence.