A great, looming and tense novel, slowly building up to a crime and hardly dwelling on the crime at all. A portrait of a small, sad and angry woman and her circumstances.
The novel is written from the point of view of Eileen as she is looking back at her youth and when and why she finally left her hometown. Moshfegh manages to convey both her personalities, that of the young, bored and rejected girl and that of the older, even elderly woman having changed her life. The older Eileen seems both a reliable narrator and untrustworthy, she is healed but sinister, there is such distance between her and the younger Eileen that we don't really have any reason not to trust her.
The portrait of the younger Eileen is deeply saddening, she is squashed and sad and has no sense of self worth, punishing herself through not eating or washing, dressing in her dead mother's clothes and drinking with her alcoholic father. We do not root for her, neither do we want her to stay in her circumstances. We watch with a detachment, aware that she is unlikeable and difficult.
