Eileen

I found Eileen on a returns cart in winter. The cover looked plain and the title gave nothing. A note inside said Booker shortlist. I read the first page standing by the radiator. An older woman says her name was Eileen Dunlop and this is how she vanished. Eileen was published by Penguin Press in 2015, a 272 page hardcover with ISBN 9781594206627. It tells one week in December 1964 that ends with a hitchhike out of Massachusetts. I expected a crime novel. What I got was a cold character study that turns criminal only near the close, which made the last fifty pages hit harder.

Eileen is twenty four, a secretary at Moorehead, a private juvenile facility for boys that locals call the prison. She lives with her father, a retired cop who drinks gin from morning and rants about being watched. Her mother died years earlier. Her older sister Joanie lives a town over and drops by with food and judgment. Eileen wears her dead mother's loose coats, eats little to stay small, and dreams of New York. Days she types and files. Nights she shoplifts small luxuries, spies on a guard named Randy, and scrubs her father's messes. She hates her body and her town, which she calls X-ville for its blankness. She also hates how much she wants to be liked.

Then Rebecca Saint John arrives as director of education, young and glamorous in a place of tired women in cardigans. Eileen falls fast. Not only attraction, though that hums under it. Hunger for a friend who sees her as more than a mousy clerk and a drunk's daughter. Rebecca smiles at her, asks for help, invites her for drinks. For three days Eileen walks taller. Then Christmas Eve at Rebecca's borrowed house pulls both women into a basement with a tied mother, a father's gun, and a bottle of pills. I closed the book feeling chilled and oddly tender toward Eileen, now calling herself Lena in New York.

X-ville in December 1964

Moshfegh sets the town as flat and frozen. Snow piled gray by plows. Shops closing early. A bus that runs late. Eileen walks everywhere in a thin coat because vanity beats warmth. She narrates from fifty years on, brisk and unsparing, correcting her younger self without softening her. She tells us early she left and never went back. That knowledge colors small scenes. A library visit feels like a countdown. A gift purchase feels like a goodbye she has not admitted yet.

Home is a two story house gone sour. Curtains yellowed. Bottles lined in the pantry. Her father sits in his chair in underclothes, shouting at the television, accusing neighbors of spying through windows. He was once a policeman and still carries a service pistol. He waves it when drunk. Cops in town know and look away out of respect for the badge. Eileen hides his keys, waters his gin, locks her bedroom door. She loves him in a duty bound way and wishes he would die in his sleep. She writes that wish plainly, then describes making his toast exactly how he likes it. Both facts sit side by side.

Joanie visits on Friday with groceries. She is married, tidy, tired of Eileen's complaints. She tells Eileen to put their father in a home. Eileen refuses because money is short and pride runs high. The sisters smoke at the kitchen table while their father snores. Joanie asks if Eileen still plans to move to the city. Eileen lies that she is saving. In truth she spends little and saves less. Shoplifted face cream and cheap wine eat the budget. The scene lasts ten minutes and explains years.

Weekend errands show her rituals. Buy gin where the clerk pities her. Read fashion magazines at the library. Lift a lipstick for the thrill of it. Park outside Randy's apartment to watch his windows glow. Randy is a guard at Moorehead, quiet and broad. Eileen builds romances around his nod in the hallway. She knows it is fantasy and feeds it anyway.

Moorehead and the dead-end desk

Moorehead houses teenage boys sent by courts. The staff call it a school to feel better. It runs on bells and forms. Eileen sits in the front office with Mrs Murray and Mrs Stephens, middle aged secretaries who knit, gossip, and guard the files. They treat Eileen as a child. They comment on her clothes and her pallor. They assign her the Christmas pageant spotlight and the visiting room roster. She accepts because refusal draws talk.

Dr Frye, the old psychiatrist, retires that Friday. There is cake. The warden introduces Dr Morris and, more important, Rebecca Saint John as new director of education.

Eileen's job gives her access without power. She types intake notes. She files incident slips. She sees names and charges she should not repeat. One file stops her. Lee Polk, new arrival, silent and thin, held in the cave, a bare cell used for solitary, after fights. Charge is patricide. He killed his father in his sleep with a knife. He has not spoken since arrival. Mrs Stephens calls him a troublemaker. Something about his stillness snags Eileen. She copies nothing but remembers plenty.

The pageant Monday shows the place at its most hopeful and false. Boys in paper crowns sing off key. Walking past the cave corridor, she hears movement. Lee stands close to the bars, looking out. Then he begins to touch himself while watching her. She freezes, watches back, transfixed and ashamed. A door slams and she hurries off. Later she pulls his file to understand him and feels dirty for the curiosity. Rebecca enters as she reads, says goodnight, spots the folder, asks to borrow it with a light tone that suggests she already knows plenty.

Father, gin, and the upstairs rooms

Tuesday morning brings trouble home. Eileen wakes after a night of fitful sleep to find her keys missing and her father raging. He demands gin before she leaves for work. She walks to the store in snow, buys a bottle, pours a glass to calm him. A patrol officer stops her on the walk back. Her father pointed his pistol at schoolchildren from the porch, thinking they were agents. Police agree to let Eileen take the gun if she keeps it from him. She slips the heavy pistol into her handbag. It bangs her hip all day.

This detail matters later, so Moshfegh lets it sit without fuss. Eileen does not plan to use it. She likes the weight. It makes her feel less small in the office. She also carries leftover tranquilizers from her mother's illness, strong pills she takes in halves to sleep. She keeps them in a tin with mints. When Mrs Murray asks why her bag looks heavy, Eileen jokes about bricks. No one checks.

Home life that week is a loop. Clean vomit. Change sheets. Listen to accusations. Her father calls Eileen by her mother's name when drunk, then curses her when sober. He accuses Joanie of stealing. He accuses Eileen of poisoning his food. He weeps about his dead wife and falls asleep mid sentence. Eileen sits with a book she cannot follow and listens to the house tick. She thinks about Rebecca's perfume and straight back and how Rebecca asked where the staff lockers were as if they were equals.

I found these chapters hard to stop. Moshfegh does not ask pity for Eileen. She shows Eileen sneering at coworkers while bathing a man who hits. You want her out, even as you wince at her thoughts.

A small mercy lands midweek. Rebecca invites Eileen to her house for Christmas Eve drinks. Eileen spends hours choosing what to wear from her mother's closet. She settles on a dress that smells of mothballs and brushes her hair until her scalp stings. Her father mocks her plans. She leaves him with a neighbor's number and a full bottle, hating herself for the relief she feels closing the door.

Rebecca Saint John walks in

Rebecca is the book's bright object. Tall, red haired, educated elsewhere, recently hired to counsel boys and plan classes. She speaks quickly, smokes in offices where others do not, asks blunt questions about home life that startle the lifers. To Eileen she seems magic. To older staff she seems pushy. Both views hold some truth.

Their first real talk happens by the lockers. Eileen shows Rebecca which hook sticks. Rebecca thanks her and remembers her name. Such crumbs feed Eileen for days.

Moshfegh based Rebecca's pull partly on old Hollywood glamour, the untouchable beautiful woman who commands a room. In X-ville that effect doubles. Rebecca knows wine and books and city talk. She asks Eileen to join her at O'Hara's, a dive bar with sticky floors, for a drink after work Tuesday. Eileen agrees before fear can stop her.

The bar night is the warmest passage in a cold book. Rebecca fends off men with jokes. She asks Eileen to dance while men stare. After Rebecca leaves, Eileen stays, drinks more, gets stuck in snow, vomits in the yard. She wakes happy for the first time in months.

Back at work Wednesday, Rebecca is bright and professional, as if the dance was small to her. Eileen replays it while typing. She accepts the Christmas Eve invite as proof the tie is real. She does not see how quickly admiration can turn into a tool when one person wants something badly.

Christmas Eve in the Polk house

Eileen arrives Christmas Eve afternoon with wine. The address surprises her. Not the nice side of town but a shabby street, a sagging house with peeling paint. Inside is worse. Dirty dishes. Unmade bed. A robe instead of the fitted suits. Rebecca looks tired and distracted, pouring hard. Eileen tries to leave twice. Rebecca insists she stay, then drops the mask.

This is not Rebecca's house. It belongs to Mrs Polk, Lee's mother. She is tied in the basement. Rebecca learned from Lee that his father raped him repeatedly and his mother knew and did nothing because the abuse made her husband tender toward her again. Rebecca arranged the mother's visit to test her. The woman showed flat remorse, saying she blamed herself in a way that accepted nothing. Rebecca followed her home, forced her inside, tied her to a pipe. She wants a written confession to take to police and to Lee, proof someone believes him.

Eileen wants to run. Rebecca begs her to stay. Eileen agrees to help scare the woman into writing. She fetches her father's pistol from her purse as a prop. Downstairs Mrs Polk begs, then admits she heard sounds and chose not to open the door because her husband grew kinder after visiting Lee's room.

Rebecca returns with paper, demanding a full statement. Mrs Polk hesitates over wording. Rebecca grabs for the gun to press her. The pistol is heavy and strange to her. It fires. The shot takes Mrs Polk in the arm. Blood spreads fast on a housedress. All three freeze. Mrs Polk screams. Eileen acts first. She shakes two tranquilizers from her tin, forces them into the woman's mouth with wine. The woman sags. The basement goes quiet except for breathing and the furnace kicking on.

What follows is grim and practical. They cannot call police without ruin. Rebecca paces. Eileen, oddly calm, builds a plan. Drive Mrs Polk to Eileen's house, shoot her there, place the gun in her father's hand so it looks like the drunk ex cop did it during a break. Her father may get care instead of jail. Mrs Polk, in Eileen's flat telling, gets release from a life she ruined. Then Eileen and Rebecca run to New York together and start over. Rebecca nods though her eyes slide away. They haul the limp woman to Eileen's car through snow. Rebecca says she will meet Eileen at the house after she cleans the basement. Eileen knows as she drives off that Rebecca will not come.

The road out and what stays

The last pages move fast after so much stillness. Eileen stops home, puts her father to bed with a fresh glass, takes cash and her mother's ring. She drives beyond X-ville with Mrs Polk breathing shallow in the back seat. She pulls onto a forest turnout, leaves the car with the woman inside, keys in, engine off. She does not shoot again. She walks to the highway in snow and lifts her thumb. A trucker takes her toward the city. She tells him her name is Lena. She keeps that name through marriage months later and through later loves and jobs. Older Eileen, writing at leisure, says she grew taller in manner if not in height, learned to dress for herself, stopped shrinking.

I admired how Moshfegh refuses a clean rescue. Eileen does not save Mrs Polk. She does not turn Rebecca in. She uses the chaos to vanish. Some readers will call that cold. The book frames it as the first choice Eileen makes for herself after years of scrubbing and typing. She leaves a bad mother to the snow and a bad father to his chair. She leaves a friend who used her. She does not look back except to write this account fifty years later with dry humor and little remorse.

Criticism belongs here too. The middle sags for readers wanting plot. Pages of diet talk and office chatter repeat the same point about self loathing. Moshfegh risks disgust with bodily detail. I skimmed one passage about laxatives.

The prose carries it. Short sentences. Blunt images. Jokes that curdle. Moshfegh writes attraction without romance. Eileen notices Rebecca's calves and laugh and wants to live inside her ease. Rebecca notices Eileen's usefulness and hunger and aims it at a basement door. Neither woman is kind by the close. Both are clear eyed about power. Scenes in the visiting room, where Eileen watches a mother fail to reach a silent son, hold more tension than the gunplay because they show how abuse hollows language.

Who should read it. Fans of bleak coming of age stories with a noir edge will feel fed. Readers who need likable leads should skip. Those sensitive to child abuse accounts should know Lee's story arrives in plain terms late and lands hard. I finished with pity and envy both. Pity for the girl who counted hours at a desk. Envy for the older woman who tells the tale without asking pardon.

Facts for the shelf are simple. First published in 2015 by Penguin Press. Print length often listed as 272 pages in hardcover with ISBN 9781594206627. No series. Tags that fit are literary fiction and thriller with psychological plus crime and 1960s. Moshfegh later wrote My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but Eileen stands alone.