Review 8: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems.

This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around.

Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page.

It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to wash, but fears that people might smell her. She refutes the idea of sex, but daydreams about it constantly. She eats hardly anything for days, then takes a battery of laxatives to purge herself. She is the nexus of self-hatred and self-control.

Like building an Airfix model or remembering to floss, reading this novel is a slow burn, but you are rewarded for your effort. The introduction of Rebecca, with all the apparent charm and manipulation that her du Maurier namesake implies, doesn’t come until at least halfway through the novel, but it’s really where the plot begins. There’s no big climax in the book, just a steady grinding inevitability that takes you from beginning to end. This is no bad thing.

Moshfegh’s writing is stark and piano-wire tense, sentences whipping like snapped guitar strings. She gives Eileen the cold, distant voice of a hypnotist’s victim, and yet this arouses pity rather than any remove. This isn’t a comfortable or a happy read, but it’ll certainly stick with you.

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