It was easy to imagine the depressive thoughts that view must have inspired in those little boys.” Later, Eileen, looking through a window, spies on a disturbed 14-year-old masturbating: “His body curled up like a small animal. When Eileen pauses to consider the view of the winter sea from the boys’ sleeping quarters, she thinks, “The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite. The great power of this book, which won the PEN/Hemingway debut fiction award last month, is that Eileen is never simply a literary gargoyle she is painfully alive and human, and Ottessa Moshfegh writes her with a bravura wildness that allows flights of expressionistic fantasy to alternate with deadpan matter of factness. Of course, things don’t work out that way: Rebecca is inviting Eileen not to a glamorous feast but to a sordid crime. 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”. Rebecca takes an interest in Eileen, and Eileen is starstruck, fantasising that this friendship will magically transform her life. This bleak outlook is brightened when a mysterious stranger appears at the prison – a beautiful, young Harvard-educated woman named Rebecca, who is the new director of education. She’s too suppressed to even imaginatively participate in someone else’s life.

Although Eileen doesn’t hate the child inmates, neither can she work up any real sympathy for them.

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, clammy, orange-hued fat, meat tough and bloodless and cold when the knife hacked through it”. She works as a secretary at a boys’ prison, and uses her abundant energy to mutely loathe her co-workers. “I f you’d seen me back then,” the eponymous narrator says, “with a barrette in my hair, my mousy gray wool coat, you’d have expected me to be just a minor character in this saga … I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s.” At 24, Eileen lives in Massachusetts with her verbally abusive, alcoholic, demented father, for whom she fetches and carries but unapologetically hates, in a filthy, derelict house she never attempts to clean or repair.

Eileen by ottessa moshfegh