Reading the lives that are lived between the lines
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel Eileen is a gripping tale set in the 1960s Boston, about a lonely woman’s struggles to come to terms with the ways of the world, writes Nirmala Govindarajan.
By Ottessa Moshfegh Pages: 272 Price: Rs 399
Who i s Eileen? You, me and everybody reading this review of the Man Booker 2016 shortlisted title Eileen. Also, all those of us battling with our identities and ideals. More importantly, those of us coming to terms with our bodies and our appearances for society’s sake. Who cares about society? Well I don’t… er… I do! I guess we all do. So does Ottessa Moshfegh’s protagonist Eileen in her Bookershortlisted novel, which bears the same name as the thin girl with a jagged figure and rumbling acne scars around whose emotions this novel searches for simple answers to the complex angst of existence and co-existence.
Eileen — the book — I must emphasise, is a very smooth read despite the tumultuous emotions that speak out loud to the reader; louder in the gaps between the words that fill the novel. In these gaps, I became acquainted with Eileen Dunlop, the protagonist, as she went to work on a Friday in the year 1964 to Moorehead, a correctional home for teenage boys. She had carried two slices of bread wrapped in tinfoil and a can of tuna fish that day. It was a holy Friday and Eileen did not want to be seen in hell because her life, to put it straight, is already tumultuous, even as she grapples between selfless compassion for her ill father and selfish pursuit of a person who would love her despite her flaws. What the hell? Hell on earth. Yes, that’s what life is for Eileen who has been called back to her family home in XVille. Her mother is very ill and so Eileen has given up her studies to return home. Not too many months later, her mother passes away. And after her mother’s death, her father, a former cop, starts manifesting an altered spirit — he has become unfit to drive his old Dodge, so Eileen does. Mr. Dunlop is unfit to drive his car because he drinks and staggers, and is of a bodily disposition, which often finds him face to the ground as he stumbles down the stairway in his home, even when he is not drunk on gin or sherry or any other intoxicating bubbly. Eileen needs to tend to him, which she does. But all Eileen wants to do is leave home. Mr. Dunlop is very ill, and at the point where the novel ends, we do not know whether he continues to stay alive or is dead.
But returning to when I first became acquainted with Eileen, I wonder whether she was 74 or 24? In the telling of this story, Ottessa Moshfegh morphs into Eileen, the skinny girl with small breasts, green eyes, a slight frame and “a glutton for punishment” — she didn’t mind being bossed over by her father, the same man who alluded to her ap- pearance as “disgraceful” when what she wanted to hear from him was the word “fancy”, and her septuagenarian self, who has had her share of lovers, been married to at least two men, and is now blissful in her singlehood.
Ottessa tells the story between Eileen’s then and now through the prism of an overtly easy storytelling style, but an inertly complicated sharing between the two women who are evidently the same.
Fancy this: Eileen has never known affection, although she fantasises about Randy, the handsome guard at Moorehead, making out with her all the time. No, not until she is 24, and meets Rebecca, the beautiful small breasted woman like herself. But unlike herself, Rebecca, is akin to a mannequin, a faultless work of art meant to be loved and seen with — Rebecca is a woman who has accepted Eileen for who she is, with the latter’s pimplepitted face, small breasts, and so on.
Or so she thinks, until Rebecca decides to take the law into her hands — actually Eileen’s hands — and sets juvenile prisoner Lee’s records right because the authorities at Moorehead have so far been incapable of getting down to the truth of the matter.
Mrs. Polk is a tangent to this tale aright. She is Lee’s mother and has watched her husband, a cop and a decent man, sodomise her son night after night.
Eileen’s father, too, is a respectable cop, and he had touched her small breasts although he had explicitly told her that neither her face nor body would beget her lovers. But Eileen does not take the matter too seriously. There are people who need to contend with worse acts of sexual abuse by their own fathers.
In communicating Eileen’s acceptance of herself for who she is, Ottessa Moshfegh has made no efforts to stall raw emotions with tried and tested methods of storytelling. Her writing is raw and tactile, like aged whiskey or wine. Eileen hits the senses with its wholesome constitution, rather than through distinct words or scenes.
Thank God for Mrs. Polk. Thank God for Rebecca.
Eileen has left home — she is 24.
Eileen is at peace with herself — she is 74.
Eileen has lied, she has stolen, she has wished her father dead before she found her own peace.
But Eileen is real. Just like you and me.
In communicating Eileen’s acceptance of herself for who she is, Ottessa Moshfegh has made no efforts to stall raw emotions with tried and tested methods of storytelling. Her writing is raw and tactile, like aged whiskey or wine. Eileen hits the senses with its wholesome constitution, rather than through distinct words or scenes.