Eileen

EILEEN

by Otessa Moshfegh

 

Award: PEN/Hemingway Winner 2016

 

Nominations: Booker Finalist 2016, Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2015

 

Date Read: October 9, 2022

 

“Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with goo-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”

 

Eileen Dunlop is invisible. She wears odd, mismatched clothes, has a plain face and is able to fade into crowds without anyone realizing she’s gone. In other words, Eileen has no one in her life who loves her. She has no friends, no partner, no mother and a father that is constantly fall-down drunk. She is resentful and self-loathing.

 

Eileen works at a juvenile detention center called Moorehouse. She has worked there a long time and yet it seems as if she’s new. None of her colleagues befriend her and her work mostly involves facilitating the parade of visitors that come and go during visiting hours. She could do her job with a hangover and one eye open and often does.

 

The only other constant in her life is her father who she lives with. Her father treats her with unconcealed disdain, occasionally confusing her with her sister Joanie who has escaped for greener pastures. Did he molest Joanie or didn’t he? As a retired police officer, he is afforded a lot of leeway in his drunken antics that border on illegal. His gun is finally taken from his possession and given to Eileen for safe keeping because he was pointing it at children walking to school.

 

Perhaps it was Eileen having the gun in her purse. Or perhaps it was Rebecca, who was supposed to develop an educational curriculum for the boys at Moorehouse. Or perhaps it was the arrival of Leonard Polk who was convicted of murdering his father. All three in fact contribute to the events that would banish Eileen from her hometown, cause her to abandon her beloved Dodge and vanish into the vast US without a trace.

 

When Rebecca arrives at Moorehouse, Eileen is immediately captivated. Rebecca is everything Eileen is not – beautiful, outgoing, intelligent, enticing. Eileen sees Rebecca talking to Leonard Polk and one day, after they had met up at a bar together, Rebecca invites Eileen to her house on Christmas Eve. Of course Eileen is going to go. Only when she gets there, something feels “off” and she keeps attempting to leave until Rebecca fesses up – the house they are in isn’t hers. It’s Mrs. Polk’s, Leonard’s mother.

 

Rebecca has learned what really happened that caused Leonard to kill his father and Mrs. Polk is just as much to blame as the father was. Rebecca confesses she has Mrs. Polk tied up in the basement. Shortly after they decide to use Eileen’s gun to coerce a confession and they descend the stairs to execute their plan, does Eileen realize that she has been hung out to dry, much like Mrs. Polk. Rebecca has no intention of following through on their plan. Eileen realizes she is disposable; that Rebecca has determined Eileen has nothing to lose. 

 

Moshfegh takes her time in building up to the pivotal point that changes Eileen’s life. It’s like a slow burn before the fire erupts into an explosion. We get to see Eileen in all her nakedness – the bleakness of her life, the hopelessness that anything will ever change, the misery she endures from day to day. The Mrs. Polk incident forces Eileen to no longer imagine leaving X-ville but to actually do it because now she has no choice. Thoroughly engaging and entertaining. Moshfegh is a master at plot twists and the element of surprise, even when you almost know what’s coming.