03/02/18: Ottessa Moshfegh – Eileen (2016)

“Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like the housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn't realized this until sitting at Rebecca's kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was.”

Shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize, this is a hugely atmospheric, claustrophobic, wintry novel that takes on a noirish/Hitchcockian element and becomes highly compelling.

Eileen lives a life of quiet desperation and self-loathing with a grim job at a boys’ prison. Her home life is a prison too, as she thanklessly cares for her dangerous alcoholic father. Then she meets the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John and her fortunes are transformed. You become aware that her life is about to change drastically, and the anticipation of the defining event is what the entire book builds up to. The novel is slow to get going but that’s precisely the point: she makes you feel the painful reality of isolation and loneliness.

But this isn’t a depressing book, nor a worthy slice of “misery lit”. The narrator’s sharp observation and the darkest possible wit – plus the old-person-looking-back-at-their-life perspective and steadily escalating tension – give it a strong narrative pull. By the final 100 pages I was transfixed.