To call Ottessa Moshfegh a promising young talent is to engage in severe understatement. She won the Paris Review‘s 2013 Plimpton Prize for her short story “Disgust.” Another of her Paris Review stories, “The Weirdos,” won a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel, McGlue, was published by the redoubtable small press Fence Books and then awarded the publisher-cum-magazine’s Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Moshfegh was a hit at the 2015 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in Minneapolis. Not long ago she completed the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
Of course, many’s the ship of titanic hype that wrecked itself on a sophomore novel, so it was with some caution that I approached Moshfegh’s new novel, Eileen. McGlue, about an alcoholic nineteenth-century sailor accused of murdering his best friend, was written in such an elliptical, even oneiric style—often more akin to poetry than prose—that it all but required Moshfegh to attempt something dramatically different on her second time out. And there was every possibility that such a something would either strain self-consciously after still more novel effects or retreat to a safe conventionality.
It is a measure of Moshfegh’s talent and assuredness that what she did instead is write a book both more conventional and vastly better than McGlue. Though it will be categorized as Literary Fiction, it is essentially a crime novel, as relentlessly bleak and brutal as anything by Jim Thompson. (Indeed, it resembles Thompson’s books The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me, with their respective themes of incest and well-concealed madness.) That said, it is more artfully written and more atmospheric than all but the finest crime fiction. Fans of the genre may wish, probably in vain, for Moshfegh to devote herself to it exclusively.
Moshfegh’s narrator, the titular Eileen Dunlop, is an old woman recalling the week in her youth—the week leading up to Christmas, 1964—during which she took control of her life and lit out from a miserable New England hamlet she calls X-ville. (The name marks the place as a stand-in for all such dead-end towns in the same way that Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville is a stand-in for all such corrupt, crime-ridden ones.) Eileen in 1964 is in her early twenties, living with her father, an alcoholic widower and ex-cop, capable of startling cruelty toward his daughter. She works as an administrator in a boys’ juvenile detention facility. She is consumed by disgust, hatred, and rage, especially of the self-directed variety.
Eileen considers herself revolting, and in certain instances the reader is unlikely to argue with her. What we primly call “body-image issues” are the least of it. Yes, she is preoccupied with mundane things like her flat chest, the unappealing color of her lips, her menstrual cycle. But she also discusses her bowel movements in nauseous detail—“With the laxatives, my movements were torrential, oceanic”—and at one point asserts that the greatest intimacy lies in popping her lover’s pimples. She vomits on herself. She allows a dead mouse to petrify in the glove box of her death-trap car. This degree of squalor ought to be overkill but it feels grimly credible. It is from this prison cell that Eileen needs to escape.
Eileen spends much of her time obsessing about—and stalking, to put it bluntly—a male prison guard; buying gin to keep her horrible, delusional father quiet and worrying about the lives and punishments of her young charges. She describes a Christmas theatrical, staged by prisoners, that is as poignant, strange, and unforgettable as the one in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. And she reveals her knack for concealing her own rage and self-loathing from the people she encounters, with a “death mask” of tranquility and deliberate mediocrity. Sometimes it fails: “It always peeved me when my flatness was met by good cheer, good manners. Didn’t she know I was a monster, a creep, a crone? How dare she mock me with courtesy when I deserved to be greeted with disgust and dismay?”
Though Eileen has agency enough to wish she could escape X-ville, she is trapped both by a lack of self-confidence and by her relationship with her father, which could charitably be called codependent but is more like a ghastly folie à deux. Then Eileen trades one unhealthy relationship for another. Into her life, and evidently unperturbed by her awfulness, steps a new prison psychologist named Rebecca Saint John. Glamorous (at least by Eileen’s lights) and Harvard-educated, Rebecca is the sort of brash, ambitious, ahead-of-her-times heroine we know from the movies, the one who wades fearlessly into the Old Boys’ Club. The twist here is that Rebecca isn’t a heroine at all. The reader guesses long before Eileen does that the “friend” she idolizes is in fact a self-absorbed master manipulator.
Characterization is one of Moshfegh’s strong suits, and Rebecca Saint John is a truly deft piece of psychological portraiture. Relying largely on dialogue—though Eileen is permitted some retrospective observations about Rebecca—Moshfegh shows us exactly how such a person would gain the trust and then the control of her lonely, needy victim. Rebecca is glamorous the way vampires are glamorous. The reader may catch on before Eileen does, but it is to Moshfegh’s credit that the reader is uncomfortable in Rebecca’s presence even before he quite knows why. Eileen’s father, by contrast, is so ludicrously mean to her that he seems more clownish than sinister, a failure pickled in bottom-shelf booze and tormented by how utterly he relies on his daughter.
When Eileen is made custodian of her father’s service pistol, it is clear that ensuing events will follow Chekhov’s rule. That said, the what, why, and how of the crime that inevitably occurs are such big surprises that there really is no guessing at them. Suffice it to say that it satisfies immensely after the book’s slow burn of pitiful and claustrophobic tableaus. We know at the outset that Eileen ultimately will escape X-ville, but it is a pleasure—if that is really the right word—to see her do so in such a strange and morally ambiguous fashion. For all her self-hatred, her pessimism, her conviction that life is “one long sentence of waiting out the clock,” Eileen proves to be quite the Houdini when the opportunity arises.
Eileen tries to be a number of different things, and it succeeds at almost all of them. As literature, with its careful and evocative prose, it is confident and sophisticated. As a genre work, it is a joy, generating its suspense with careful control. And as a Bildungsroman it compellingly depicts a young woman grappling with the fact that she must change or accept unhappiness, even if it means abandoning her only remaining familial connection. It is only the book’s awkward relationship with its own inherent comedy that disappoints. A character as negative as Eileen can only generate so much sympathy before she becomes a mere figure of fun, and Moshfegh gets dangerously close to that line. The male analogue to Eileen is perhaps one of Michel Houellebecq’s pathetic, sex-starved narrators, and Moshfegh is similarly interested in the way life capriciously and unevenly doles out its gifts. But at her best Moshfegh does what Houellebecq so rarely manages to—she elicits our compassion, not our laughter, and makes us see hope in the darkest—and most unlikely—places.