But like every noir protagonist, she has a hidden agenda: She wants to flee to New York with her savings and her father’s car, an ancient Dodge with a broken exhaust system that forces her to keep all the windows open lest she suffocates.įrom the start, the reader knows she got out. Randy aside, there is little to hold Eileen’s interest in X-ville. “I spent many hours watching his biceps flick and pump as he turned each page of his comic book.” “He had a way of sitting with one flank on the stool, one off, a foot hanging midair, a posture which presented his crotch as though on a platter for me to gaze at,” she rhapsodizes about a hunky corrections officer conveniently named Randy. She skips showers in order to revel in her own stink. She keeps a bottle of sweet vermouth in her work locker. She has a habit of stealing chocolates from the drug store. Eileen’s got that, too: Like someone straight out of “The Grifters,” her formative trauma - her mother’s early death, her father’s madness - has dashed Eileen’s chances of happy young adulthood and has twisted her into a stunted, mean-spirited, and deeply neurotic weirdo. Good intentions are scarce in this bleak New England town, while self-interest abounds. I truly felt that the inside of my mouth was a private area, caverns and folds of wet parting flesh, that letting anyone see into it was just as bad as spreading my legs.”Īdding to poor Eileen’s already crappy lot, she is trapped in a novel with all the touches of classic noir. The time I spent disciplining that lip, you would not believe. “When I did smile, I worked hard to keep my top lip from riding up, something that required great restraint, self-awareness, and self-control.

“I felt my mouth was horselike and ugly, so I barely smiled,” she confesses in an early passage.

Eileen a novel by ottessa moshfegh