“There was a reason I worked at the prison after all, I wasn’t exactly a pleasant person.”Įileen’s thoughts reverberate with negativity toward herself. Eileen works at a boys’ detention center where teenage boys are imprisoned for committing some horrific crime like burning down the family home or murdering a parent or sibling. Occasionally Eileen goes to a movie by herself telling her father she is going out with friends, but her father won’t believe her. Eileen’s cruel mother died a painful death a couple of years ago. She stays at her New England home taking care of her drunk abusive father who is an ex-cop and thus well-respected in the community. The 24-year-old woman Eileen in ‘Eileen’ doesn’t get out much. Usually the term ‘Dirty Realism’ was applied to short stories, but ‘Eileen’ is a novel, a sustained performance. “Depictions of ordinary people, using transparent prose that gets uncomfortably close to the fabric of the characters’ lives.” I came across the following definition of ‘Dirty Realism’ in an article about Tobias Wolff by Claire Allfree in Metro magazine: I want to explain to you what Dirty Realism is, because ‘Eileen’ is the best novel of Dirty Realism I have read in a long, long time. ‘Eileen’ by Ottessa Moshfegh (2015) – 260 pages
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