4 stars

An off-kilter genre-bending experience, after I've read all her recent work, I'm backtracking to reading Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh's debut full-length novels. It's now evident how much she has honed in on her writing voice and style since the very beginning: the obsession with grotesques human details (lots of talk about bowel movement here), extremely skewed perception of the world, and larger-than-life characters behavior verging on black comedy—it's really a love-it or hate-it type of literature.

For a large portion, Eileen reads like an intense character study, as the protagonist reminisces on her day-to-day prior to a critical Christmas Eve. The plot is purposely aimless (I understand its intention but can't say I was fully onboard in its entirety), until a mic-drop moment at around its 85% mark—it is definitely a jolt to the system and appreciated from a narrative standpoint.

Eileen probably ranks lower among the novels I've read from her (My Year of Rest and Relaxation remains my favorite), mostly due to the uneven pacing, but still a worthwhile one. Really curious to see how the film adaptation will turn out, as the trailer seems to include scenes from the book, but tonally it's nothing at all what I expect (way more elegant and restrained).