Let me be clear from the start: Eileen is a good novel and worth a read, but it is not a perfect novel. As Social Realism it has strong credentials, but as a psychological thriller, which it clearly is also meant to be, it is weaker. That’s the lens through which this review should be read.

It was only after I finished reading Eileen that I realised the book was giving me Wasp Factory vibes. For anyone who knows Iain Banks’ classic story of Frank Cauldhame, growing up on a small island just off the Scottish coast with his father, the connection may seem tenuous, even spurious. Eileen, the titular character, is a twenty-four-year-old woman living with her father in a small American town she calls X-ville. Like Frank, she is a loner. Her relationship with her father (as well as her now-dead mother) is a factor in her awkward sense of self. And as in Frank’s story, we know everything is building to something awful, a crime Eileen will commit, a fact she often foreshadows. Eileen makes the subject of her story clear: “This is not a story of how awful my father was” she tells us quite early on; rather, “This is the story of how I disappeared.”

Eileen’s world is bleak and seemingly without prospect. Her father is an alcoholic and she was forced to leave college in her sophomore year to care for her dying mother. In every way she is alone, but her drab existence is balanced by her fantasies of unobtainable men and derisive musings about her coworkers. Eileen’s primary fantasy is to escape X-ville and her drunken father, but the only resources available to her are a small amount of money she has stashed away and her father’s car which fills with exhaust fumes and prevents her driving any distance. Eileen is a prisoner: in her situation, in her community and in her body. Reinforcing this sense of imprisonment is her employment at a private correctional facility for teenage boys she calls ‘Moorehead’, after the name of a former landlord, Delvin Moorehead. The point is clear enough. Though we know Eileen will escape X-ville, she signals a sense of present and future entrapment by conferring her landlord’s name on the prison. Of Moorehead, the prison, she states, “I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes – a prison for children.” Eileen is twenty-four years old in this narrative, but there is something perversely childlike about her. She fantasises about a work colleague in vague scenarios and even stakes out his house, hoping to witness some private salacious moment. But she is also somewhat repelled by sex. Yet her much older self – she must be seventy-four years old as she narrates her story, if you do the Maths – claims her life is now “beautiful” in every way, because she remains alone. Eileen is a story about becoming. Older Eileen says, “I was not myself back then”. But it is unclear by the end of her story how she has changed to gain this sense of life satisfaction, only that she has embraced a sense of self that she once found alienating.

Eileen is essentially a psychological thriller. We live in her head although we are not privy to everything we might wish to know. The tension in the book is like a band pulled taught. At one end there are the uneasy, sometimes disturbing things we know about Eileen and her life, and at the other, that anticipated moment, her crime upon which we wait that is the catalyst for her escape. Because we have read other books like this – books like The Wasp Factory – our attention is commanded early on, for we expect the narrative buzz this kind of story is going to produce. But the problem with this book is its pacing and resolution. Moshfegh demands we wait too long, that we vacillate in X-ville along with Eileen, increasingly aware she has no real plan, and like an elastic stretched too long, the tension withers somewhat and its narrative energy diminishes.

What we have too much of is Eileen’s head and self-loathing, which is established early in the piece. There is a litany of detail that covers this. Eileen is self-conscious about her physical body, including her genitals and mouth, which she likens together as liminal spaces between her and others:

I truly felt that the inside of my mouth was such a private area, caverns and folds of wet parting flesh, that letting anyone see into it was just as bad as spreading my legs.

Naturally, Eileen is self-conscious about her smile, speaking more so. She hates showering and detests scents that conceal body odour, but she is self-conscious about her body odour, too. She has poor skin. She feels aroused by her coworker, Randy, even by young boys in the prison, like Leopold Polk whom she sees masturbating, but she feels ashamed of her sexuality to the point that she often vomits.

Of course, we must balance this assessment against what Moshfegh does well. Eileen is too insular, too equivocal to carry the plot on her own. Instead, Moshfegh employs subplots and character foils to highlight what Eileen could not directly articulate. Leonard Polk, like Eileen, is also a victim (however much we may sympathise with or are repelled by her). We are aware of a level of physical and psychological abuse in Eileen’s own household, and the concomitant response by each character highlights not only the complexities of abuse, but how emotionally shutdown and withdrawn Eileen is. Next is Rebecca Saint John, who arrives at the prison as its first ever director of education. Rebecca is attractive, confident, well educated, and she turns Eileen’s head with a few moments of engagement. Rebecca’s presence is not only a catalyst for Eileen and her plan, but she is all that Eileen imagines herself becoming. Eileen dresses to impress her, tries to appear more sophisticated than she really is, and willingly follows her, even though early on she understands that this flirtation is on some level also a manipulation.

Both Eileen’s situation and that of boy prisoners like Leopold Polk raises the question of nurture and nature. Rebecca is clearly an alternate self in this story, treated to a privileged upbringing, wealth, connections and education. Conversely, Eileen is somewhat like Polk, trapped in a kind of poverty, denied (on some level) her education, and abused to some degree. When Eileen sees Rebecca within the context of the Polk home, her mere presence in that environment is enough to make her seem less glamorous, less controlled and assured to Eileen. The symbols of wealth, culture and success are significant. Similarly, a nativity scene Eileen sees outside her father’s church also raises the question of signification and judgement. Someone has defaced it, plastering Mary’s lips with bright red lipstick, like “a jack-o’-lantern smirk” Eileen observes, but we also understand that Mary has been recontextualised as a whore, the very redness recalling Eileen’s genitalia she associates with her mouth. Context is everything.

There is so much that Mossfegh does well in this novel, and this social aspect seems to be its strength: in fact, the ending really provides a platform for exposition around the novel’s social issues. Eileen, clearly, is more than a psychological thriller. It is a snapshot of America. Eileen sees the hardship of children and their families every day. But their suffering is implicitly her own. It is not by accident, I feel, that Mossfegh has Eileen’s father assign a reading of Oliver Twist from front cover to back as a punishment, like a nineteenth century patriarch slamming the Bible down on the desk between them. Dickens’ works had a social edge, and her father’s injunction to read him is intended to curb Eileen’s self-destructive ways as much as it is to control her for his own benefit. Eileen culminates on Christmas Eve, a period of the year special to Dickens and traditionally rife with opportunities for change and atonement. Her father’s intended punishment seems like a drunken choice, but inserted into a piece of Social Realist fiction, we see that Eileen is also a Dickensian view of America – a small town, poor conditions and the lack of opportunity – though the novel’s protagonist is not as pitiable or relatable as Dickens’ own child protagonists were to his nineteenth century audience.

Essentially, Eileen and Rebecca represent a class divide that exists even in America, a country predicated in its inception upon classlessness and opportunity. Without recourse to an upbringing like Rebecca’s, and faced with hardship, poverty and abuse, the question arises as to how one defines the idea of ‘good’ within the actions of any individual: whether we are prisoners of our own upbringing, our bodies, our desires and insecurities, or whether we can transcend them? And does privilege confer rights that the unprivileged would not reach for? Is Rebecca essentially more ‘good’ than Eileen, whatever their transgressions?

Rebecca believes that people don’t embrace being bad. The boy prisoners are victims of a system. She sees incarceration and the reform system as a form of shaming that elides the underlying causes of those who do wrong. It is easier to deal with behaviour outside its context rather than address the deep-seated social conditions that cause transgression. For her part, Eileen believes she is good because she follows a set of rules that balance her worst impulses, yet she still believes in punishment as integral to the social system.

So, Eileen is something of an intelligent psychological thriller with a social conscience, but it doesn’t deliver on its potential. Its unevenness makes it feel like the first novel that it is. The moment that we see the narrative make its final stretch, as it tenses for that final snap, the tension has already waned: it comes too late and the denouement is too safe. We’ve been hanging around in X-ville all this while, waiting for Eileen to move and realising that it’s never going to happen unless she’s pushed to do it. Maybe I wanted something as impressive and transgressive as The Wasp Factory, another first novel. Instead, what there is here is well executed but slightly too conventional and sensible for the circumstances, and it fails to surprise, which may leave the reader wanting more, but not in a good way.