Come On Eileen

"I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen."

Unreliable and unlikable narrators usually fall into two categories: fascinatingly frustrating or frustratingly annoying.

With Eileen there is deception, a grey area. A character that is an exception to such rules. Author Ottessa Moshfegh has assembled her in a ominous lab a la Dr. Frankenstein. You'll either see her as a disfigured, pathetic misfit or want to raise a pitchfork to a complete monster --- or you may find yourself somewhere in that muddled middle.

The voice of Eileen that we're introduced to is less than pitiless, as its in the distant present. She's older, calmer, and seems more at peace with herself, as she reflects on the muddled mythology of a time when she claims to have "disappeared". That time is the early 1960s, somewhere near Boston in a town that she distinguishes simply as "X-ville". She is in her mid-20s, self-loathing, and miserable, wiling the days away occupying two separate prisons. One she works within --- a private boy's prison where she shuffles papers and swoons over a prison guard named Randy who doesn't even know she exists. The other she lives in --- a disheveled trash heap of a home playing warden to her drunk and disorderly father, a widowed ex-cop who exudes verbal and mental abuse towards her on the daily. Vying for a way out of her hell hole, Eileen receives it one day when the beautiful, red-haired siren Rebecca Saint John glides into the prison as its new education director, and the two of them intertwine and submerge into a seedy reality.

This reality is what is warped. On the outside Eileen is seen as a dowdy, apathetic spinster, but on the inside, a storm of deviant thoughts swirl within her ranging from the sexual to the violent to the disgusting (TMI on the what she does with her bodily fluids...). Her unhealthy thoughts on her body and with food swirl around her in a cloud of filth.

"I guess that is how those sick people get by. They look like nobodies, but behind closed doors they turn into monsters." 

Even in times of self-loathing, she also possesses a superiority, this especially when she gets around her loathsome father, and her co-workers at the prison, but strangely, never the young prisoners she's around, she in fact sympathizes with them even though some are child killers and have slit the throats of their parents. Though she denies it, Eileen wants to belong, to not be as invisible as she's made herself to be, but she still has a "I'll show them" fist wave in her hunched shuffle.

"I was naive and callous. I didn't care about the welfare of others. I only cared about getting what I wanted."

I'd ignore the blurb of this book. It's as unreliable as Eileen is. There (spoiler!) really isn't a "mystery" here. It's more a decent into concentrated ugliness, a tale that has you test your perception skills and screws with you along the way. Oh you're led down into the dark cavernous basement of someone's sordid mind, and you go slowly, the flashlight in hand a bit dim, leaving your surroundings distorted, making you question everything and wonder what sinister discovery will make it's presence known...

...that is till you reach the bottom floor, slap the flashlight, and the light gets a little bit lighter, wider, and then you see how that lump in one corner is the hot water tank, another lump is the pile of clothes you forgot to wash, and that sinister figure over to your right? A cluster of lawn tools.

Such a set-up wasn't much of a letdown as Paula Hawkins' The Girl On The Train was for me, in fact I enjoyed that it was more in lockstep with the gothic madness Shirley Jackson doled out in her classic We Have Always Lived In The Castle where you are the voyeur of a character that crawls on all fours within their own homicidal mind, and where even as cool and calmly as they peel layer after layer to reveal themselves at a tedious pace, you're left a bit shaken. This play on perception is what I found the strongest aspect of this book, even when it is the most frustrating.

Eileen is a captivating figure who, in the beginning, is deftly drawn by Moshfegh. Even as I was repulsed by her throughout and felt suffocated by the sweat and swill that surrounds her, there was a intriguing slant to her character even in her incessant vileness, to where the deeper into her mind I went the more curiosity took hold, itching to kill the cat. This type of repugnant character was quite brave to tackle as despicable women aren't usually the type of fare that elicits the same type of three-dimensional character analysis that a horrible male character would. Eileen being unorthodox in her stance, in her thoughts and feelings, representing the type of woman who wasn't pious and practical, someone who made her middle-aged co-workers recoil and judge, was a delicious shock to savor.

Rebecca as the fizzy cosmopolitan antithesis of Eileen was another interesting addition. The two of them representing some sort of twisted ying and yang of unconventional women, the both of them taking a more violent approach to be seen and heard. It's this violence that unites Eileen and Rebecca. Violence for Eileen is an itch she can't scratch, and Moshfegh pushes you to be attentive to this by her blunt and taunt dialogue that has just enough nicotine and disaffection on it to drive you into the book's final hour. Throughout Eileen is desperate to do something, anything that implodes the grotesque monotony of her every day existence, and when Rebecca extends such an opportunity, the opportunity to commit a criminal act, she is almost liberated:

"They return to their villages entirely new people, imbued with the spirit of God, fearless of death, and respected by everyone. Perhaps this experience in the basement, I thought, was akin to that. After it was over I'd be living on a higher plane. No one could ever hurt me, I imagined. I'd be immune."  

Oddly, I was more charmed in the moments where it seemed Eileen's mask would slip, where her sociopath edge dulled, and she began to stumble around Rebecca. Their relationship was a bit fascinating for me as Eileen attaches this feverish expectation on Rebecca, seeing her as a friend, a mother figure, an unattainable lover, and as competition rolled into one. It's real pathetic the desperation Eileen has, this want to latch onto a kindred spirit, and latch onto someone who is out of her league at that. Her clumsy girl crush on Rebecca is one of the few moments of levity in the swill, as Rebecca's bubbly glamour puss demeanor sets her up as someone who can go 180 at any moment --- and well, does. When their relationship begins to deepen (well according to Eileen anyway...) Eileen comes face to face with someone who is just as warped as she is.

Now, remember I said this wasn't as described? Remember how this tale is like shining a light on a lump you think is something frightening, and its nothing but that pile of dirty clothes you forgot to wash?

Eileen, for all of its wonderful turns of phrase and biting inner-dialogue is all build-up, with no follow-through on what it takes to be a monstrous person, especially a monstrous woman, the type of character that is much needed in crime literature these days. Often this book feels like an overlong prologue, where we're on a continuous loop of setting up and describing characters, setting, of Eileen as this woman of mystery and misery. Things become repetitious, darlings are never 'killed'. While I had no issue with this, as I love to chew on a good often meandering character study, the end game for all this framework is dismal where the balancing of such fascinating elements never meets the characters half-way. Once Eileen and Rebecca get to the edge of their fused violent natures, where they bond over wanting to punish those more vile than they are, they become bumbling fools this side of Abbott and Costello, killing whatever ominous bond they possessed.

If you're building a monster, you let the monster attack and bare its teeth. You don't have the monster just take out its dentures, sit down, and start applying glittery nail polish its claws. But that's exactly what Moshfegh does at Eileen's end, she has Eileen punk out, and comes up with the most ludicrous criminal act and follow-through that can be set to paper. The Irish Times scathingly called this book a "very lame, poor man's American Psycho", and as I've only seen the film (and never had much interest to read the book), I agree that Eileen does feel like a feeble retread as Eileen doesn't go full-tilt batshit as Patrick Bateman does, even when the build-up of her character is a lit dynamite string winding towards powder.

Sure, Moshfegh has achieved in Eileen the sort of black and white psychological mischief that an Alfred Hitchcock Presents hour could drum up, while creating a character that is a charter member of Patricia Highsmith's band of stoic ice cold sociopaths, but there is a way she does it that doesn't feel authentic, almost too eager to please. There is a smug smirk that rests within the prose of this that doesn't send a chill up my spine, but allows me to eye roll every so often.

Moshfegh does herself little favor as in a 2016 Guardian interview, she admits her motivations for writing Eileen, and Moshfegh comes across as derisive and arrogant as the character she created. She wrote this book as a middle finger to those who wrote thrillers, wanting to prove how easy it can be to make a quick buck, with her laughing all the way to the bank (and hoping for a movie deal in the pot). What she didn't expect was that this would be short listed for the Man Booker prize and receive prestige literary praise. As much as I like her intent on bucking the system, and writing a character that is deplorable and explores the ways we as humans "all go a little mad sometimes", Moshfegh needs to bring her nose down from pointing at the sky, as Eileen borders on the hack quality she so much scoffs at, as she missed an element of what makes such 'hacks' readable --- she forgot that there needs to be a thrill to the chase that allows for character development past descriptors.

I don't hate this book. I did give this a solid three stars and found Moshfegh's assembling of a grotesque person, but frighteningly honest individual to be a riveting read for the most part, but there isn't enough resolve for me, enough plot to really kick this in the direction the prose was desperately telegraphing from the beginning. There is little that Eileen learns in that one week where she "disappeared", we're left in a vague haze at the reasoning for Eileen to relay her sordid tale 50 years later. For that, it's a disappointment, leaving you with a "...and so what?" feeling.

If you don't mind stewing in the filth of a dangerous mind, Eileen is an excursion to take, but if not, look away. Eileen knows you will.

////

from the margins 

• Rating: ***
• 272 pages
• Published in August 18 2015 by Penguin Press

• So Was Rebecca Really There? I think I was also let down with the ending as I kept wondering if Rebecca was a figment of Eileen's imagination, that Eileen and Rebecca were "one in the same". I was waiting for that twist and maybe that's where some disappointment lies. Just me? 

• Alternate Take. If this book was a bit smarter it could be an allegory of the aggressive, blow back towards the prim "wholesome" morality of 1950s that the radical 1960s provoked. Mentions of the assassination of JFK, civil rights, and other such cultural and social shifts gave me this idea while reading. This along with Eileen and Rebecca representing a new, younger generation that all but shook the status quo of what it meant to be an American, an American woman at that time, as the rise of women's rights took shape --- as well as the rise of the murder rate and apathetic attitudes --- becoming a new norm.