![]() ![]() Which is no index of happiness, Moshfegh seems to say, as the narrator outlines her semi-abusive relationship with an on-off lover, Trevor, a banker whose “favourite thing” is to “fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep”. But where Eileen was dowdily anonymous, our self-confessed “somnophile” is “tall and thin and blond and pretty and young”, or “hot shit”. “No moisturising or exfoliating,” she says, glorying in “eye boogers and scum”. Readers of Eileen won’t be surprised to find the narrator rejecting Reva’s regime. Exactly what it is that the never-named narrator might be opting out of is clarified by visits from a bulimic former schoolmate, Reva, an insurance broker caught in a joyless affair with her married, middle-aged boss studying Cosmopolitan, watching Sex and the City and regular pilates has, we’re told with no little glee, failed to get Reva the husband, children and career she wanted. For some, she’s a ghoulish shock merchant who still manages to be dull to others, who found Eileen a structurally daring anti-thriller kept afloat by the narrator’s feminist vitriol and confrontationally bad hygiene, Moshfegh has become a pin-up for the fightback against the notion that fictional characters – especially female ones – have to be likable.Īs a recipe for drama, it’s far from obvious, despite the endpoint of its very specific timeline. Potentially a Ratner moment (she later said it ruined her chances of winning), the admission stoked the renegade aura of a writer who divides the critics. ![]() ![]() “ I needed to write something that was going to be reminiscent of the crap that people are used to … How do you expect me to make a living?! I’m not going to be making cappuccinos. W hen the US author Ottessa Moshfegh was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker prize with Eileen, a slow-burn psycho-noir narrated by an unloved prison clerk, she let slip that she wrote the book with help from a guide called The 90-Day Novel – a calculated lunge for mainstream success following McGlue, her lauded but commercially disappointing debut set among sailors in 19th-century Zanzibar. ![]()
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