Thirty-year-old
Eleanor Oliphant lives a strictly regimented and isolated life. During the week she works as an accounting
clerk; on weekends, she drinks two bottles of vodka and speaks to no one. She has had the same job for nine years,
since she graduated from university, and in the dozen years she has lived in
her apartment, she has not had any real guests:
“It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own
imagination.” In fact, her only interaction
outside of work is a weekly conversation with her mother: “When the silence and the aloneness press
down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes [to my
plant], if only for proof of life.” Things
change when she and Raymond, a new colleague, help an elderly man; slowly, she
gets drawn into the wider world. As her
external world opens up, so does her inner world; she slowly decides to
confront the childhood trauma that left her emotionally and physically scarred.
Eleanor
stands out as odd. She dresses
unfashionably (“flat, black, comfortable [shoes] with the Velcro fastenings”)
and speaks very formally, without colloquialisms. Her extensive vocabulary is impressive but
her forthrightness can give offense.
Though intelligent, she cannot read social cues. For example, she learns that she needs to
bring a gift when invited to a party; not knowing what to give a man for his
birthday, she gives him a half bottle of vodka and a packet of cheese slices
since “All men like cheese.” When the
man opens his present, “He looked at each item in turn with an expression that
I found hard to read, but I quickly eliminated ‘boredom’ and
‘indifference.’ I felt happy; it was a
nice feeling, giving someone a gift, the kind of unique, thoughtful present
that he wouldn’t have received from anyone else.”
Eleanor tends
to be very judgmental, not realizing that she has the very traits she
criticizes in others. For instance, she “unraveled
the string on my mittens from my sleeve” yet sneers at Raymond for wearing a
duffle coat: “A duffle coat! Surely they were the preserve of children and
small bears?” She bluntly tells a woman,
“’You don’t look like a social worker’” but when the woman doesn’t know how to
respond, Eleanor says, “In every walk of life, I encounter people with underdeveloped
social skills with alarming frequency.
Why is it that client-facing jobs hold such allure for misanthropes?” She spends twenty minutes explaining the
benefits of a travel pass to Raymond but when he shows lack of interest, she
concludes, “He is a spectacularly unsophisticated conversationalist.”
There is so
much humour in Eleanor’s lack of knowledge about social conventions. I loved her reaction to singing and dancing
to the Y.M.C.A. song: “Arms in the air,
mimicking the letters – what a marvelous idea!
Who knew that dancing could be so logical? During the next free-form jiggling section, I
started to wonder why the band was singing about . . . a gender- and
faith-based youth organization.”
But there
is also truth to her observations. Once
she starts taking pains with her appearance, she observes, “Being feminine
apparently meant taking an eternity to do anything, and involved quite a bit of
advanced planning. I couldn’t imagine
how it would be possible to hike to the source of the Nile, or to climb up a
ladder to investigate a malfunction inside a particle accelerator, wearing
kitten heels and ten denier tights.” She
also wonders, “Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves
wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When
they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but
exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior,
because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles
ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something
unflattering?”
There is
also a great deal of sadness in the book.
Eleanor was raised in foster care and describes her experience as
fine: “’Being fostered was . . .
fine. Being in residential care was . .
. fine. No one abused me, I had food and
drink, clean clothes and a roof over my head.’”
When asked if her emotional needs had been met, Eleanor is “completely
taken aback” and says, “’But I don’t have
any emotional needs.’” Another time,
she admits, “There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as
those on my face. I know they’re
there. I hope some undamaged tissue
remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”
Having a mother who can only be described as abusive, Eleanor is astounded
to hear a man say he hopes his children find happiness: “Was that what people wanted for their
children, for them to be happy? It
certainly sounded plausible.”
Throughout, we are reminded that she is like the donated furniture in
her apartment: “unloved, unwanted,
irreparably damaged.”
The book
emphasizes the human need for contact.
When Eleanor makes a friend, “a genuine, caring friend,” she feels she
has been saved. The importance of
kindness is also stressed. When Eleanor
does a kind deed, she is amazed: “I
would never have suspected that small deeds could elicit such genuine, generous
responses.” Her kindness to a stranger
is in fact what begins her own transformation.
I understand
why this book won the Costa Debut Novel Award.
It will leave you cheering for Eleanor as she finds herself. At the beginning she has a “tiny voice” but
she learns that her own voice “was actually quite sensible and rational” and
decides, “I was getting to quite like my own voice, my own thoughts. I wanted more of them. They made me feel good, calm even. They made me feel like me.” The book will also leave
you wanting a sequel.
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