Eileen captivated me. A complete vision of a world, fully encapsulated. Moshfegh is known for her short fiction and this really shows here. I always think that short stories are novels distilled into perfect capsules and Eileen read like this. You were drawn entirely into this world and almost forgot that you were reading at all. This novel held me as tightly in its fictional world as The Loney and I utterly recommend it. You believe utterly in Eileen as a character and Ioved the slow inexorable way we are drawn into her dark tale. Not for the squeamish, perhaps but all the more potent for this fact. I totally loved it and I'll be recommending it to everyone. A dark, delicious five star read!

This is a hard book to pigeonhole. On the one hand, it is wonderfully written, poetic, looping, well observed and fascinating and on the other seems full of mistakes, repetitive language and missed opportunities with a rather flat climax.

To start with the good bits - I was hooked from the very beginning. I was mesmerized by Moshfegh’s prose and I love an anti-hero. With set ups such as ‘this would be the last time I left the office,’ I was fully on board to hear about Eileen’s adventures. As the character study deepened, I had a feeling reminiscing of reading Dostoevsky. When the Rebecca character came along, I was excited too. She was drawn so well, I was convinced she might have been someone I knew. Their developing relationship sounded exactly like an experience I’d had with a beautiful, confident redhead at about that age. And Rebecca’s unhinged actions, which bring about the catalyst for Eileen’s change, were totally unpredictable from my POV. So if I could have just had these parts I would have been thrilled by Eileen.

However... there were too many issues for me in this book to make it enjoyable. The first 20 pages of exposition soon turned into 80 pages of the same information told from another experience. We learn early on that her father is a drunk, that she has body issues, that she steals, that she’s ambivalent about a range of elements in her life, but these get revisited time and time again with no further effect. The only outcome is that things we are told – that the author tells us are so for Eileen – get confused. Yes, Eileen is an unreliable character regarding her body and feelings about sex, but in one passage she tells us she has an idea of what a penis looks like from her father’s porno mags and 20 pages later she tells us as her father’s mags don’t include penises, she relies on a text book. There’s also some details about her mother which don’t seem to mesh. At the beginning, she bitterly complains that the house is dirty because her mother isn’t there to clean up anymore and later on gives us the impression that her mother was a poor housekeeper. This feels like the subject has been over written to the point where the author has lost hold of the threads. However, if it is meant to be further evidence of unreliability, it goes so far as to make anything she says dismissible.

I was really looking forward to reading Eileen, so much so that I didn’t even read all of the Guardian review before searching it out. If I had, I would have read that the book fails as a thriller. It was only after I finished Eileen that I went back to the review, curious what Sandra Newman had said of it and why. That’s when I read the last line ....

“Eileen is original, courageous and masterful...however, the plot machinery simply stands immobile until it’s cranked into life at the very end, whereupon it unceremoniously malfunctions and falls apart...”

I hate to end a review with a review, but that sums it up. Eileen is beautifully written prose, but the plot is not great thriller or suspense fiction material.

Wow! Strange, funny, has all the elements you need in a great read!

An interesting story line, I how ever could not get myself interested enough to continue reading.

This is quite a brooding character study, very compelling in how it keeps on the cusp between disgust and empathy as you wait for a promised metamorphosis by the title character. You are taken into the mind of a 24-year old woman who is trapped in a sucky life. She tends to her despicable but ailing alcoholic father, a retired cop in rural coastal town in Massachusetts, while working as a sort of secretary in a correctional institute for boys. We come to learn she is surprisingly well adapted to this cocoon of a life. Sort of like the old Simon and Garfunkel song: “I am a rock, I am an island … I have no need of friendship. Friendship causes pain …”. But the story is told from a much later point in her life when she has attained an allegedly more enlightened outlook and humane mode of existence. We can’t help feeling a bit of dread over what ugly actions may be in the store to make that possible. Near the beginning of the tale we are told:
<i> In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared.</i>

Eileen is cowed by her father, but still she gets something out of her ability to handle him. He is dangerous to himself and others when he goes out on a binge, so she deprives him of shoes and his car keys. Thus, she has some kind of agency in the situation. Aside from a sister who moved far afield, he is the only family Eileen has. The bond she has with him I don’t believe is that uncommon in our society. He may not physically attack her, but the verbal abuse has a pervasive stunting impact on her development:

"He was very contemptuous of me, found me pathetic and unattractive and had no qualms about saying so. …So I loathed him, yes, but I was very dutiful.
…My father’s demands that I do his bidding like a maid, a servant, were constant. But I was not the kind of girl to say no to anyone.."

The later Eileen, looking back, finds some empathy for her former self that most readers can join in on:
"Although I was small and wiry then, I believed that I was fat, that my flesh was unwieldy. I could feel my breasts and thighs swinging sensuously to and fro as I walked down the hall. I thought everything about me was so huge and disgusting. I was crazy in that way."

She has no love life and is still a virgin. She has a hopeless crush on a guard at the correctional facility, and engages in obsessive fantasies about him, which begins to move toward stalking. But soon an elegant, charismatic woman from Harvard, Rebecca, arrives at the facility to do a practicum in counseling, and her special attention to Eileen begins to spin her head around. Though she is electrified by her seductive ways with her, she doesn’t really align with Rebecca’s professed compassion for the serious criminals at the facility as victims of abuse:

"Why should my heart ache for anyone but myself? If anyone was trapped and suffering and abuse, it was me. I was the only one whose pain was real. Mine."

Rebecca instigates events that draw Eileen into a major change in her life. Crippled as Eileen is emotionally, she has some strengths that make her ready to take significant action. The words that the future Eileen applies to her state at this time can’t help but make us wary about her latent capabilities:
"My eyes were small and green, and you wouldn’t—especially back then—have seen much kindness in them. …I looked like a shy and gentle soul from afar, and sometimes I wished I was one. …I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore, moping around. I really thought I had everyone fooled. And I didn’t read books about flowers or home economics. I liked books about awful things—murder, illness, death. …I often felt there was something wired weird in my brain, a problem so complicated only a lobotomy could solve it—I’d need a whole new mind or a whole new life."

The psychological suspense is this tale is well done. It has some of the same impact as the creeping horror in more explicitly Gothic tales like du Maurier’s “Rebecca” or Shetterfield’s “The Thirteenth Tale.”

This book was provided by the publisher for review by the Netgalley program.