Summary:
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors.
Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. But her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.
My take: 3 looks
I was looking for the title “Death in her Hands” by same author. It was not available, so I got this one. This is my first book to read by Ottessa Moshfegh, but will be the first of many. Such beautiful, descriptive writing!
Eileen is a very pitiable woman. She has been unloved and emotionally and verbally abused by her father, a mean drunk. Even though she is an adult, she continues to live with her father in a rundown home, sleeping in the unheated attic to put more space between her and her father. The story takes place during a frigid winter week in the 1960s, and is told in a series of flashbacks.
Other reviewers have said that Eileen is without sympathy, but I found her to be very sympathetic. She was completely and totally broken, and by her own father. That in itself gets my sympathy. Because she is so emotionally damaged, she has very odd habits, thoughts, and impressions. She works in the front office of a juvenile detention center with a couple of other women who treat her poorly. She entertains herself by making up questionnaires for the visitors, including off-the-wall questions. She also fantasizes about one of the guards, going so far as to part outside his home.
Then Rebecca enters the picture, as a new employee at the center. Rebecca is everything that Eileen admires: successful, beautiful, assertive. She becomes Eileen’s new obsession, with interesting and unintended results.
But I have told you too much. At the heart of this well-written book is a deft character study. The relationships, the internal monologues, and the interactions are beautifully written. It makes me want to read the other titles by this author, and I can’t think of a better recommendation.
Recommended.
