Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh

What is that old saying? A friend is someone who helps you hide the body--that was the gist of this new rapport. I sensed it immediately. My life was going to change. In this strange creature, I'd met my match, my kindred spirit, my ally. Already I wanted to extend my hand, slashed and ready to be shaken in a pact of blood, that was how impressionable and lonely I was. I kept my hands in my pockets, however. This marked the beginning of the dark bond which now paves the way for the rest of my story.

The title narrator of Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen lives a sad and narrow life: she lives in a small New England town in a pigsty of a house, where she takes care of her father, a former cop and alcoholic prone to paranoid fantasies about hoodlums and thugs. She rarely bathes and always wears the clothes of her mother, who died at the end of a wasting disease. She works at a local boy's prison as some kind of administrative assistant, and spends her free time stalking a hunky guard named Randy who doesn't even know her name. She pities the boys in the prison, but Eileen is in a prison more or less of her own making, a prison of filth and drudgery she has built out of a diminished sense of her own deserving.

All that changes when a new director of education appears at the prison: an elegant redheaded woman named Rebecca Saint John. Rebecca takes an instant liking to Eileen, but nothing like the liking Eileen takes to Rebecca. She forgets all about Randy and plunges headfirst into an obsession with Rebecca, who is so unlike any person she's ever seen in the town she calls "X-Ville." Throughout the novel, Eileen, recalling the story as an adult, teases us with the knowledge that Rebecca's appearance in her life was the catalyst she needed to abandon her father and run away to New York, where she has lived the remainder of her life. Is Rebecca really so inspirational? Sort of, yes, but it's more than that--as it turns out, Rebecca involves Eileen in a criminal act that gives her the permission and the opportunity to blow her life apart.

Although the climax of Eileen takes its cues from crime thrillers, it's mostly a very understated book. Moshfegh lingers with skill over Eileen's life in the week before Christmas, the day she leaves home. It's really a character novel, a convincing portrait of a young woman trapped in her own sense of inadequacy and fear of life. The older Eileen tells us that, in her 20's, she long believed that she would eventually chuck everything and run away--she even planned out a route where she would drive in the wrong direction, abandon her car, and hop on the train--but it's easy to imagine this fantasy remaining a fantasy, like the romantic fantasy she holds out for Randy, and Eileen's life slipping away from her. How do we change? Eileen asks. And is living for ourselves always a great crime, because it means that we leave others by the wayside?

In the end, Eileen is a novel about transformation, a bildungsroman at a rapid pace: Rebecca appears in Eileen's life for a brief instant, upends everything almost unwittingly, and shuffles out again in an act of deflating cowardice. Rebecca may not be the person Eileen dreamed she was, but Eileen still can be.