Taking place in 1964, Eileen is set in the cruel winter landscape of a small Massachusetts town simply referred to as X-Ville. Moshfegh forsakes what is often an unspoken contract in fiction between writer and reader, a fleeting promise of the revelatory, and refuses her readers an easy reward, instead trading notes of resolve for disquieting ellipses.Įileen, her debut novel from Penguin Press, is in many ways a splash of cold water after the drunken fever dream of McGlue, her first novella that proved her an emerging literary voice to watch. Yet, Moshfegh’s short stories do not usually offer what O’Connor called “a moment of grace,” that fictive window that hinges on personal epiphany. Like O’Connor, she specializes in grotesqueries, her characters garnering little sympathy and are, at times, repulsive. Her stories are cast with the misfits of society, their behavior often unjust and unexplained. Ottessa Moshfegh’s short fiction reads like Flannery O’Connor for a new, more disillusioned generation.

The moment passes by in the novel quickly and with little explanation, but it’s a telling gesture in a story so concerned not exactly with sacrilege of God, but of oneself, told by a narrator for whom “having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself.” She takes the cloth and wraps it around a bottle of wine she is to give as a gift at a Christmas Eve party. But when she lifts the fabric, she reveals that it was concealing an empty canister of motor oil. Toward the end of Eileen, the titular narrator purloins a golden cloth swathing what is supposed to be the infant Christ in an outdoor nativity scene.

Eileen a novel by ottessa moshfegh