Moshi mosh motherfeghers! Otessa? More like Grotessa! All bad jokes aside, this is a grotesque book. As with Homesick for Another World the author specialises in feelings of disgust. This takes many forms. Eileen, the protagonist and narrator, has many features that seem designed to make the reader feel discomfort. Physical things like her extreme malnutrition, her dirtiness, her habit of wearing her dead mother’s ill fitting clothes, her oceanic bowel movements and her propensity to vomit. Psychological disgust and repulsion are also front and centre. Eileen’s homelife is as depressing and squalid as the house itself. Her delusional, alcoholic father treats her like a slave and only speaks to abuse and denigrate her. Her work at a correctional facility for boys is mundane and repetitive. Her internal life is also sordid and degenerate. She fantasises about killing her father and plans to run away. In essence, everything is miserable and seems stage managed to make your stomach turn. It’s laid on very thickly and this can be a little much. However, it does serve to emphasise how mundane and unhappy Eileen’s life is both internally and externally.
There are two big turning points in the book. One - the arrival of Rebecca, a new educational consultant, at Eileen’s work and two - the subsequent happenings of their early friendship. The pace of the book is slow and drudging to begin with, which I enjoyed. Things suddenly explode into action later on. Rebecca appears in the book like a character from another world. She is beautiful, self-confident, educated and appears upper class and cosmopolitan. Eileen falls in love with her instantly and is disbelieving that Rebecca will even give her the time of day. It brings some meaning and enjoyment into her life beside her plans of running away, which she seems to lack the bravery to execute before Rebecca arrives. The shining ray of brilliant, almost implausible, sunshine that is Rebecca doesn’t last long before it is considerably dimmed and contorted by the novel’s monstrous filter. This was probably the best bit of the book for me. I loved the chaotic incongruity of what Eileen thinks is Rebecca’s house when she goes to visit. Eileen is expecting stylish decor, luxurious homeware and exotic alcohol served in refined glassware. When she arrives to discover a scene of poverty and disarray that Rebecca couldn’t possibly have curated in the few weeks since she moved to X-ville; it is obvious that something is up. Has Eileen imagined Rebecca’s sophistication at work? It is certainly possible given how deranged Eileen seems. Has Eileen invented Rebecca entirely? Will Rebecca turn out to be a murderous psychopath? I felt like it might be a caricatured plot twist like this but in the end it was so much better. Rebecca has had a chat with a, previously silent, inmate at the correctional facility. He tells her that the reason he killed his father is because his father used to rape him every night with the complicity of his mother who used to give him an enema after supper. If this seems quite heavy, it is a good example of the general tone of the novel; it is disgusting and repulsive in the extreme. In any case, it turns out that Rebecca has driven to the boy’s mother’s house and locked her up in the basement in order to extract a confession, to precisely what ends remains uncertain, and has called Eileen to assist her. This is a good plot twist and an excellent way of explaining the insane dissonance of Eileen’s view of Rebecca at work and what she encounters when she arrives.
Rather less good are the following scenes. The boy’s mother is threatened by Eileen with a gun and confesses. Apparently she permitted the rape of her son through a sense of spousal responsibility and obedience. She also says her husband’s raping of her son coincided with rejuvenation of her husband’s sexual desire for her, which she enjoyed enough to ignore the darker goings on surrounding it. Because the husband used to fuck her after sodomising his son, she gets vaginal infections and starts administering the enemas in an attempt to stop this. This all seems rather muddled, implausible and hastily flung together after the more considered pace of the earlier parts of the novel. Things continue in this vein when Rebecca drops the gun that Eileen happens to be carrying because her drunk father can’t be trusted with it anymore and, lo and behold, it accidently shoots the implausibly bound captive mother in the arm. It all feels a bit slapdash especially after the fantastic plot twist with Rebecca.
There are some excellent portions of dark humour in the book. Eileen’s awakening after a night of drinking with Rebecca on p152 is funny and accurately describes the disorderly aftermath of extreme intoxication. On p202 Eileen is perturbed by ‘Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly’ when, in the absence of a corkscrew, she smashes open the bottle of wine Eileen has brought on the countertop. Conversely, the scene where Eileen steals Jesus’s swaddling from the nativity scene to wrap up the bottle of wine seems a forced and clunky attempt at symbolism.
The book had some really great bits but wasn’t consistently good. It had an uneven, patchy pace and structure. With the exception of the scenes in Rebecca’s ‘house’ and the associated plot twist, I prefered the more quotidien sections. Everything I have read by Otessa Moshfegh is so militantly depraved and ugly, I wonder why she chooses to exclude more positive feelings and sentiments from her work so entirely. Perhaps it is something deep and philosophical relating to sin and moral corruption being more permanent facets of the human character than, for instance, joy, love and beauty. Whatever the case, I didn’t dislike this book for being dark. I did feel that it is overdone and poorly executed in some places. If it remains the sole focus of her work, would this end up making her a rather one dimensional author? It’s surely too early to tell but I think it would be a shame if such a good writer limited herself in this kind of way.
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