Disgusted of X-ville

Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review, which has published her stories and given her a prize. It recalls, half a century later, a week in the life of Eileen Dunlop, leading up to Christmas 1964.

Her mother, whom she loathed, has died some years ago, and at the age of 24 Eileen is living in a dreary New England town she calls ‘X-ville’ with her father. He’s a demented, gin-sodden retired cop whom she also loathes, and whom she is supposedly looking after, though her care is limited to shouting at him, maintaining his gin supply and hiding his shoes to prevent him from terrorising X-ville in his pursuit of imaginary ‘hoodlums’.

She works as a secretary in the local boys’ prison, where she drinks sweet vermouth from her locker, devises absurd questions for a ‘state questionnaire’ issued to visiting mothers (‘Do you believe there is life on Mars?’) and lusts after a guard called Randy, spending ‘many hours watching his biceps flick and pump’ as he turns the pages of his comic book. In her spare time she shoplifts from the local drugstore, stalks Randy, and drinks more vermouth.

Beset by intimations of incest and child-abuse, Eileen is consumed by disgust at practically everything around her, though there is lyricism in her disgust — at the snotty tissues discarded by the visiting mothers, for example, ‘marked with lipstick like fat, dead, pink-tipped carnations’.

Still a virgin, ‘of course’, she is obsessed with her ‘poor nether regions’, and is ‘easily roused by the grosser habits of the human body — toilet business not least of all’; her bowel movements are ‘a whole other story’, and she does not hesitate to share it.