Book Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
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This book should have been called Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Boring. It took me a long time to get into it but I persisted, thinking there must be a whopping great twist coming at the end. There isn’t. I turned the last page, thinking there must be another chapter. There wasn’t. I can honestly say this is the first book I’ve ever read where I felt cheated out of a proper ending.
Eleanor Oliphant is weird. Everyone thinks so. Her office colleagues think so. The people on the bus think so. The man who sells her two litres of vodka every weekend thinks so. She thinks so, too. At least, she knows she isn’t like everyone else. When she sees Johnnie Lomond singing at a concert one night, she thinks he’s the perfect man and begins to crush hard. She imagines they will meet and her life will change in an instant. So she begins to stalk him. She tracks him down on social media and finds out where he lives.
At the same time this is happening, she happens to witness an elderly man take a fall in the street. She and her work colleague, Raymond, tend to the man as they wait for an ambulance (well, Raymond tends to him and Eleanor makes pointless conversation with his unconscious form) and from that point on, Raymond seeks her out for a series of platonic social engagements even though he mistakenly thinks she is falling in love with him and doesn’t feel the same. It seems implausible. They meet for lunch, they visit the old man in hospital, he introduces her to his mother, they go to the old man’s son’s birthday party.
And interspersed with all this are Eleanor’s weekly phone calls from her mother, who appears to be in prison or possibly a hospital for the criminally insane (but it isn’t specified). She tells Eleanor she’s a worthless, pointless, waste of a human being and Eleanor calls her “Mummy” and takes it because good girls love their mothers.
And that’s pretty much it. Eleanor has a boring and lonely life. She works, she does the crossword, she shops, she drinks, she stays home. But it’s hardly abnormal or worthy of a 400-page novel. Her reaction to realising the singer will never return her affection is over the top and comes out of nowhere. And then the pace with which she bounces back seems off the charts.
In the Q&A with Gail Honeyman included at the end of the book, she says she was inspired to write a novel on loneliness after reading an article about a woman working in a big city who often went the whole weekend without speaking to anyone. I get that. I get that she wanted to explore the epidemic of loneliness that infects the lives of many people these days. What I don’t get is why Eleanor had to be prickly, unsociable, unlikeable, lacking in empathy, with facial scars, a childhood history of abuse and abandonment, and a survivor of domestic violence and rape for her to do this. Because the subconscious message about loneliness becomes that it is the fault of the lonely that they are lonely. They are unpleasant misfits who bring their loneliness on themselves. Which is – to be frank – bullshit. There are plenty of people who are pleasant, friendly and empathetic with unblemished complexions, loving families still around and partners who don’t beat or rape them who are lonely regardless.
Eleanor is another in a long line of unreliable narrators but she’s not a well-executed one because she’s very specific and accurate (in an autistic kind of way) about everything except the one thing that isn’t true, which leads up to the “big” reveal. But the “big” reveal was not shocking at all. It just felt like the writer was trying to manipulate the reader into feeling something that all the words leading up to that moment in no way justified.
I’m absolutely stunned by reviews calling this book “original”, “unforgettable” and “devastating” because I found it uninspired, unremarkable and lacking.
2 stars
*First published on Goodreads 19 July 2020
