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She lives alone with her retired-cop alcoholic father since the death of her mother, and her relationship with him seems limited to buying him bottles of alcohol and avoiding him altogether. The novel fixates on solitude and isolation, alcoholism and child abuse, the icy gray New England suburbia of her town, “X-Ville,” and the even grayer ambience of Moorehead, the boys’ juvenile detention center where Eileen works. SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter >

This was the kind of girl I was.” This is a portrait of the most miserable, most bored, most “nothing special” (Moshfegh’s often-repeated words) protagonist you might meet, from looks to spirit. And there is also the voice, fashioned like the disconcerting conscience of a David Lynch heroine: “Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself. The most experimental element is the point-of-view: The story is being told by Eileen Dunlop in her 70s looking back on the week around Christmas 1964. “Eileen” adopts convention and dips it into murky Moshfeghian brown, which is more staunch bleakness and delightful filth than any antique sepia.

Moshfegh has a brown voice, soft and full as beer, sure - but other brown things too: earthy, mundane, unassuming, fertile, even fecal.īut compared with her debut, last year’s celebrated novella, “McGlue,” and many of her stories (published in places like the Paris Review), the novel “Eileen” is Moshfegh’s most conventional work, almost classical by her canon, and yet my guess is many will join me in finding it her best work yet.

One of my favorite lines in poetry is the opener to Anne Sexton’s 1962 “For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God,” which begins, “God has a brown voice,/ as soft and full as beer.” These lines swill around in my head whenever I enter one of the strange universes of Ottessa Moshfegh.