Rating: 4/5, good
This book surprised me more than anything I’ve read in a long time.
I came in expecting a grim, feminist narrative about a girl growing up in a small town, overcoming adversity, and coming into her own, and what I got was an extremely dark, gritty story about a young girl’s depressing home life told with such candor and detail I had a hard time believing it was fiction.
The situation starts bad and it slowly gets worse and weirder as it goes. It’s one of those books that’s somewhat unpleasant to read, but you just can’t put it down because the main character, Eileen, is so funny, unique, and relatable.
Eileen lives with her father in a small, snowy town on the East coast. Her dad used to be a policeman, but is now a hopeless alcoholic. Eileen has a crappy car she uses to make gin runs for him. They literally subsist on peanuts, which leads to some gastrointestinal issues. Eileen is intensely sexually repressed because her father tells her she’s ugly all the time and she’s internalized that. She thinks she’s below male attentions, so she channels that sexual energy into a lot of strange fantasies and sexual practices which are both funny and sad.
All of this makes Eileen a little bit suicidal. One of my favorite scenes is when she’s leaving the house to go get gin for her father and thinking of slamming the door and getting rent in two by an icicle:
“If I had slammed the front door hard on my way out, as I was tempted to, one of those icicles overhead would have surely cracked off. I imagined one plummeting through the hollow of my collarbone and stabbing me straight through to the heart. Or, had I tilted my head back, perhaps it would have soared down my throat, scraping the vacuous center of my body—I liked to picture these things—and followed through to my guts, finally parting my nether regions like a glass dagger. That was how I imagined my anatomy back then, brain like tangled yarn, body like an empty vessel, private parts like some strange foreign country. But I was careful shutting the door, of course. I didn’t really want to die.”
Is that perfect, or is that perfect? It’s beautiful.
(If you don’t agree, this book probably isn’t for you…)
Anyway, that’s Eileen’s voice, and it’s pretty consistent throughout the book.
The book is told by a future Eileen, who is living in New York, so we know Eileen escapes her situation somehow, but the big mystery is how. And I don’t want to spoil it, but it was definitely not what I was expecting and it hit me like a semi truck. I could kind of feel it coming, since Eileen’s narration throughout the whole book feels like she’s building up to some big event, but when it happens it’s one of those great revelations that you never see coming.
If you like black comedy, this book is a can’t-miss. It’s gross, it’s smart, it’s one of those books that makes you feel less alone in the world. And the fact that it’s by and about a woman is just the cherry on top. I would wholly recommend it to all fans of the literary/black comedy/picaresque genres.
(-1 star because some of the detail feels a bit pointless and it does drag in parts… but it also pulls you through those by dangling that suspense carrot in front of you)
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