Even readers with a high tolerance for unreliable, misanthropic, or psychotic narrators (think The Collector, The Wasp Factory, God’s Own Country) might baulk at Eileen Dunlop, the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s compulsive, Man Booker-shortlisted debut novel. By the end of the book, one has supped so full of her corrosive jealousy and toxic scorn that one feels in need of an emetic. Yet it is telling that all of the earlier novels feature male voices; that the protagonist here is female increases the sense of transgression and thrilling voyeurism. Like Nora Eldridge in Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, pilloried for being “unsympathetic”, Eileen doesn’t even attempt to make us like her. She is hell-bent on having her unflinching say in full; and like a passenger in a car going past a road accident, you’ll find it hard to turn away.
Eileen tells her story fifty years after the main action has occurred. This takes place over a week in December 1964 in the Massachusetts suburb she calls X-Ville, where she lives alone with her paranoid, gin-soused, ex-cop father. Having dropped out of university, she is working at a correctional facility for young boys, and spends her days fantasising about the gormless beefcake warder Randy and indulging in poisonous flights of misandry. She is obsessed with her bodily functions (it takes a while to forget the page on her epic constipation) and clearly “loathes everybody”. Eileen simply hates people – her parents, her colleagues, herself. She doesn’t even like dogs, though she cried more tears over the death of her Scottish terrier than that of her mother: “My mother was mean and that dog was nice. One doesn’t need a college degree.”
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