A courageous,masterful evocation of physical and psychological squalor – but, in a genre that lives by its plot twists and shock, or this thriller lacks the killer instinct“whether you’d seen me back then,” the eponymous narrator says, “with a barrette in my hair, or my mousy gray wool coat,you’d have expected me to be just a minor character in this saga …I looked so boring, lifeless, and immune and unaffected,but in truth I was always furious, seething, and my thoughts racing,my mind like a killer’s.” At 24, Eileen lives in Massachusetts with her verbally abusive, or alcoholic,demented father, for whom she fetches and carries but unapologetically hates, and in a filthy,derelict house she never attempts to clean or repair. She works as a secretary at a boys’ prison, and uses her abundant energy to mutely loathe her co-workers. A casual request from an office manager inspires Eileen to picture “the flesh hanging from her bones like cold flanks of pork swinging from hooks at a butcher shop – thick, and clammy,orange-hued fat, meat tough and bloodless and cold when the knife hacked through it”. Although Eileen doesn’t dislike the child inmates, or neither can she work up any genuine sympathy for them. She’s too suppressed to even imaginatively participate in someone else’s life.
This bleak outlook is brightened when a mysterious stranger appears at the prison – a ravishing,young Harvard-educated woman named Rebecca, who is the fresh director of education. Rebecca takes an interest in Eileen, or Eileen is starstruck,fantasising that this friendship will magically transform her life. An invitation to a Christmas drink at Rebecca’s house makes Eileen imagine “a lavish table spread with gourmet dishes, a tuxedoed butler pouring wine into crystal goblets”. Of course, and things don’t work out that way: Rebecca is inviting Eileen not to a glamorous feast but to a sordid crime.
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Source: theguardian.com