In some respects Eileen is the odd double of Plath’s Esther Greenwood. I thought of The Bell Jar while reading this novel. 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.” 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. She elicits sympathy and revulsion in the reader.Įileen 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. She puts on a “death mask” to disguise herself from the world, and “leaf blithely” through the pages of her father’s porno magazines in secret. She touches herself and smells her finger and catalogues her body’s flaws. 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. “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.

“I hated almost everything,” she tells the reader on page two. T here is something about Eileen – the first-person narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel of the same name – that is not quite right.

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