Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh review – an odd double of Plath's Bell Jar

Moshfegh’s first novel delves into the mind of an unhappy New Englander in the 1960s, one a little too in love with her own awfulness

There is something about Eileen – the first-person narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel of the same name – that is not quite right. “I hated almost everything,” she tells the reader on page two. “I was very unhappy and angry all the time.” She lives in a squalid menage with her alcoholic father, with whom she has a profane, semi-sexual, very occasionally fond, mostly murderous relationship. She works at a correctional facility for boys, where she passes the time by composing meaningless questionnaires for the mothers who visit the inmates, and lusts for the most handsome of the prison guards. She touches herself and smells her finger and catalogues her body’s flaws. She puts on a “death mask” to disguise herself from the world, and “leaf[s] blithely” through the pages of her father’s porno magazines in secret. She elicits sympathy and revulsion in the reader.

Eileen narrates her own story from a remove of decades, reminding the reader always that she is describing her final week, or day, or afternoon in the drab Massachusetts town in which she lives. Certain things keep rattling around the story, like her father’s gun, or a suspiciously beautiful woman who comes to work at the correctional facility and who gives Eileen a thrill. The pace at which Eileen the narrator and Eileen the novel reveal each new piece of nastiness is very effective, alarming news delivered casually; for example, we learn that Eileen is engaged in some minor stalking of the handsome prison guard: “I spent most Sundays…driving to and from Randy’s house.”

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