Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys' prison, Eileen Dunlop dreams of escaping to the big city.

In the meantime, her nights and weekends are filled with shoplifting and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes.

When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted, unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. But soon, Eileen's affection for Rebecca pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination.

“I'd never learned how to relate to people, much less how to speak up for myself. I preferred to sit and rage quietly.”

There’s an underlying uneasiness to this somewhat stream of consciousness tale; an almost haunting feeling like there could be a supernatural element introduced at some point, but it never arrives. I don’t know if that’s what Shirley Jackson embodies at times, as I have yet to read the heralded author. Eileen is certainly a slow-burner—emphasis on slowburn—with moments of meandering coming of age blended in, but I enjoyed my time with this complex character study. Due to its intricate narrative pacing I do think it begins to lose steam in the third act, but there was a consistently palpable comparison to the great film, Carol. A strong debut for Moshfegh, and you can easily see the fleshed out development from Eileen to the Narrator in her best book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation.