In 1964, 24-year-old Eileen Dunlop lives in a small coastal Massachusetts town with her emotionally abusive, alcoholic father and works a dead-end job as a secretary in the office of a juvenile detention center. Eileen's lackluster life has her imagining all kinds of wild and violent things, stalking a co-worker she finds physically attractive, and generally being an unpleasant person. But she also dreams of running away to New York one day ... and that one day something shocking happens.

This is an odd book, although I think it was good overall. It's not a crime novel per se, although there is a crime at the heart of it and Eileen's work at the prison plays a huge role. It feels like a 1930s hard-boiled detective story, just minus the detective. Instead, that (usually male) character is replaced by Eileen. She has a lot of that sort of stereotypical protagonist's backstory and characteristics, including few real ties in terms of friendship, family, or romantic partners and thus is easily swayed when a femme fatale comes into her life.

In Eileen's case, although she describes it as a "crush," she also makes note to say it's not a romantic feeling for her femme fatale. Rebecca, the new woman at work who has Eileen in awe, is sophisticated and worldly -- or so it seems. Like Eileen, the reader is constantly left wondering about Rebecca and who she is really, where she comes from, and what she cares about deep down.

Moshfegh is certainly talented as a writer and that shows. Words and phrases flow beautifully, even when the content is not necessarily so. (She does have a tendency for the gratuitous, particularly when it comes to bodily functions, so your mileage may vary here.) She knows how to build tension, with Eileen constantly throwing foreshadowing hints here and there as she narrates the story. (Although the main story is set around Christmas 1964, Eileen is narrating from a distance in the present as a much older woman.) Moshfegh also gets the psychology of people, with Eileen being that type of person who desperately wants to be loved but makes herself unlovable as a defense mechanism, more than likely because of the emotional abuse she's suffered. In a lesser writer's hands, having such an unlikeable main character could sink a book, but here it works.

Like many a good noir novel or movie, the book ends in such a way as to leave readers questioning the ethics of justice, and revenge and questioning their morality of what's right and wrong. It is a haunting story that will stay with you as you muddle it over, just as Eileen does in her later years.

The audiobook narrator does a superb job. So much of the story is just in Eileen's head and pure narration like that can often be done in a somewhat dull way, but this narrator speaks so much life into every word, with tons of vim and vigor. The dialogue is more limited, but she does a good job giving everyone a distinct voice. ( )

Eileen Dunlop is the narrator of this story which takes place in 1964 before Christmas in New England. Her dysfunctional life consists of working as a clerk at the local juvenile detention centre and living with her alcoholic father in a nice neighborhood.
She has no friends, is estranged from her only sister and puts up with verbal abuse from her widowed father who only leaves the house to attend Sunday mass with his sister. He is a former city cop and now has advanced liver disease and paranoia but drinks all day. It’s a dreadful existence but the author makes it seem very interesting with her character development and story lines. It’s a good study of family dysfunction, substance abuse, co-dependency and some hope for a better life.
Eileen makes plans to run away to New York York city and start a new life. All of this changes when a new employee, Rebecca is hired as a pedagogical consultant for the detention centre. ( )

Well, Moshfegh's writing continues to be soaked in the repugnancy of the flesh, as were her previous two published books. But here there is also a forceful, difficult to resist lure to it. Eileen hates her body and treats it with the disgust she believes it deserves - starving it, leaving it unwashed, suffocating it in layers of oversized clothes, purging her colon in fearful sounding laxative binges. Unwillingness to have anyone else see her naked flesh is her main reason for not killing herself. She works in a prison, maybe a rather surprising note from Moshfegh in light of her career thus far insofar as it could suggest that this attitude is a bit... askew. Previously her characters may have been down and out, but they were placed in normal society.

But Eileen actually takes hesitant steps to develop beyond this negative fixation on the flesh. She lusts after one of the prison guards, the subtly named Randy, in the fairly normal manner. She views with awe and admiration the stylish new prison educator, Rebecca, and admires her well-adjusted body image. Look, we've got characters here whose bodies aren't written as disgusting! Finally, the book is narrated by Eileen in old age looking back on this, her far past, with a rueful yet self-forgiving attitude toward her previous hang-ups, having been married a few times and now apparently a healthy liberal old gal.

Looking forward to seeing how Moshfegh's writing develops from here.

( )

Suspense

Most of the novel gratuitously details the elaborate inner life of a neurotic woman and her dysfunctional relationship with her father, while promising an unspecified transformative event in the future. When the event occurs it's a little anticlimactic until you realize that it was all a bait-and-switch. The big event was never the point; the intended focus of the book is the main character herself. The climax is intended to reveal another facet of the narrator's personality. It occurred to me days later that the title of the book is "Eileen" and not "The Thing that Happened to Eileen." ( )