Eileen relates her young life from fifty years ago. By the fifth page, Eileen is a confidante – but her memories are not trustworthy.
Eileen’s story builds a picture towards something terrible, as she describes her suffocating near-sexual co-habitation with her widowed father in a dirty, hoarded house, the pair held together by a fragile loyalty to her dead mother. It is when she befriends Rebecca, a bright and breezy co-worker who is uncannily nice to her, and an attractive prison guard, Randy, that Eileen cannot draw appropriate boundaries.
As in Plath’s “The Bell Jar” Eileen is unlikeable and yet magnetic, whisked along by her own demons into the worst, obscure decisions instead of the obvious, happier solution, in the vein of Plath’s fatalism. Themes are strangled sexuality, the loss of body as a sensual tool, and how this manifests when faced with the mirror of an attractive, socially assured woman in Rebecca.
It is a study in damage, and how that is projected onto others, a private world of pain only now being shared like a sacred secret, or picked scar. It’s heady and seductive writing, so intimate sometimes it feels like too much. For example, Eileen scratches her vagina under her desk and smells her fingers, then shakes hands with a manager who is retiring that day with the same unwashed hand.
Eileen’s narration and grim detail show how a nasty character can have a reader cheer for her. The author achieves this by setting the two Eileens fifty years apart, a wiser version of Eileen plays sympathiser to past Eileen’s motives. This doesn’t help the older Eileen’s storytelling, as she misses basic decencies; the author uses this to fuel interest in both versions of Eileen. For example, young Eileen is obsessed with smells, especially on other people. Yet she lives in a filthy, stinking house with her alcoholic father. Older Eileen is an unreliable narrator, and for this we can forgive the generic lurch in the third act, and understand the editor who let it go. There needs to be a payoff after all the dirt and crumbs, even if it’s a bit bleh.
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