‘Eileen,’ by Ottessa Moshfegh (Published 2015) (2024)

“I looked like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus,” begins “Eileen,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s seductive novel, “reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography, perhaps wearing a net over my light brown hair.” This is the eponymous Eileen, and we quickly learn that any assumptions we might make about her from her appearance would be dead wrong. “I didn’t really read books about flowers or home economics,” she tells us a few pages later. “I liked books about awful things — murder, illness, death.”

But murder, illness and death are so generic — and Eileen is anything but generic. Eileen is as vivid and human as they come. And because Eileen’s favorite topic is Eileen, she does not skimp on the details. She keeps a dead field mouse in the glove box of her Dodge Coronet. She wears lipstick to hide the natural shade of her lips, which are the color of her nipples. She has fantasies about the icicles that hang over her front door “cracking and darting through my breasts, splicing through the thick gristle of my shoulder like bullets or cleaving my brain into pieces.” She went to college for a year and a half, was called home to take care of her dying mother, took a job as a secretary at a correctional facility for boys, and now, at the age of 24, continues to live at home with her housebound father, an abusive, paranoid ex-cop: “He was fearful and crazy the way old drunks get.”

But Eileen does not keep house for her father. She refuses to clean, make meals or wash clothes. She simply brings bottle after bottle of gin to keep him in the stupor he prefers. “Here was the crux of my dilemma,” she tells us. “I felt like killing my father, but I didn’t want him to die.” Eileen dreams of leaving this coastal Massachusetts town — X-ville, she calls it — for a new life in New York, but her sense of duty, however minimal, keeps her stuck there. By the end of the glorious first chapter, however, the reader is assured that this is not a book about being stuck. It is a book about getting free. “In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared.”

Eileen’s desire for freedom is not purely geographical. It is 1964, and a woman’s options are limited. She ought to have found a husband by now. She tells us in many different ways how unattractive, how invisible she was back then (the novel is told by an older, far more experienced Eileen, now in her 70s), but we get the sense that her lack of allure was subconsciously intentional — the last thing Eileen wants is ­another man to take care of. Besides, she has a lot of mixed feelings about sex.

Through Eileen, Moshfegh is exploring a woman’s relationship to her body: the disconnection, the cultural claims, the male prerogative. “And at the time, I didn’t believe my body was really mine to navigate. I figured that was what men were for.” As a result, physical urges, particularly desire, repulse Eileen. “Sexual excitement nearly always made me feel sick.” Yet she has sexual desire, a lot of it; she just can’t see a path toward satisfying it. She doesn’t want to be thought of as a whor*, like her sister, Joanie, who ran off with her boyfriend at age 17. “I’d always believed that my first time would be by force,” Eileen says. “Of course I hoped to be raped by only the most soulful, gentle, ­handsome of men, somebody who was secretly in love with me.” She denies herself all of her appetites. She rarely eats, and she spits out what she does, or expels it with laxatives. Her one pleasure, as post-coital as it gets for Eileen, happens in the basem*nt after a particularly extensive use of the toilet: “Empty and spent and light as air, I lay at rest, silent, flying in circles, my heart dancing, my mind blank.”