There\u2019s something perversely hypnotic about following a narrator who openly acknowledges their own repulsiveness. In \u201cEileen,\u201d Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s brilliantly unsettling debut novel, we meet one of contemporary literature\u2019s most unapologetically squalid protagonists: twenty-four-year-old Eileen Dunlop, a woman so consumed by self-loathing that reading her story feels like watching someone slowly peel off their own skin.<\/p>\n
The novel, set during a frigid December week in 1964 in a coastal New England town (which Eileen calls \u201cX-ville\u201d), chronicles the final days before Eileen\u2019s dramatic escape from her stifling existence. Moshfegh creates a claustrophobic world where Eileen is trapped between two prisons: her job as a secretary at \u201cMoorehead,\u201d a juvenile correctional facility for boys, and her role as reluctant caretaker to her alcoholic, delusional father\u2014a former police officer whose deteriorating mental state<\/a> manifests in paranoid ravings about \u201choodlums\u201d and \u201cthe mob.\u201d<\/p>\n What makes \u201cEileen\u201d so discomfiting yet impossible to put down is Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s unflinching commitment to her protagonist\u2019s nauseating inner life. Eileen\u2019s narrative voice\u2014told from the perspective of her older, wiser self looking back after fifty years\u2014catalogues bodily functions and physical discomforts with clinical precision. Her focus on excretion is particularly unsettling; she describes her constipation in vivid detail, her reluctance to shower, and her habit of keeping a dead mouse in her glove compartment as a talisman.<\/p>\n Moshfegh excels at creating an atmosphere that mirrors Eileen\u2019s internal desolation. The X-ville winter is brutal, with snow piled in dirty heaps and icicles hanging like daggers from rooftops. The Dunlop household exists in a state of suspended decay:<\/p>\n This physical environment becomes a perfect externalization of Eileen\u2019s psychological state\u2014stagnant, frozen, and quietly rotting beneath the surface. In one particularly telling scene, Eileen describes how she uses a mason jar in the attic when she can\u2019t be bothered to go downstairs to use the bathroom.<\/p>\n The narrative gains momentum with the arrival of Rebecca Saint John, a beautiful, sophisticated woman who joins Moorehead as its new director of education. Rebecca represents everything Eileen is not\u2014confident, stylish, seemingly liberated from societal expectations. Eileen\u2019s immediate infatuation with Rebecca veers between admiration and envy, eventually developing into something more complex and unsettling.<\/p>\n What makes this relationship so compelling is how it exposes Eileen\u2019s desperate need for connection, validation, and escape. When Rebecca invites Eileen for drinks at a bar, then later to her home for Christmas Eve, Eileen\u2019s hunger for friendship overrides her better judgment. The relationship becomes the conduit for Eileen\u2019s criminal complicity and eventual flight from X-ville.<\/p>\n Moshfegh demonstrates exceptional psychological acuity throughout the novel. Eileen\u2019s obsessive thoughts, her bizarre coping mechanisms, and her stunted emotional development are rendered with unflinching precision. Consider how she describes her fear of being seen:<\/p>\n This blend of self-consciousness, shame, and barely acknowledged sexual curiosity perfectly captures the paradoxical nature of Eileen\u2019s character\u2014simultaneously repressed and preoccupied with the body\u2019s most primal aspects.<\/p>\nMasterful Atmosphere of Cold and Decay<\/h2>\n
After my mother died, we never sorted or put her things away, never rearranged anything, and without her to clean it, the house was dirty and dusty and full of useless decorations and crowded with things, things, things everywhere. And yet it felt completely empty. It was like an abandoned home, its owners having fled one night like Jews or gypsies.<\/h4>\n
The Catalyst: Rebecca Saint John<\/h2>\n
Psychological Precision<\/h2>\n
I still had that pubescent fear that when people looked at me, they could see through my clothes. I suspect nobody was fantasizing about my naked body, but I worried that when anyone\u2019s eyes cast downward, they were investigating my nether regions and could somehow decipher the complex and nonsensical folds and caverns wrapped up so tightly down there between my legs.<\/h4>\n
Crime and Moral Ambiguity<\/h2>\n