Book Review – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I almost quit this book in the first fifty pages because I found the main character so fussy and deeply unlikeable. She’s aggressively bright but socially awkward, reading like an autistic person. It seemed that she didn’t have any friends and didn’t want any friends and felt faintly superior to everyone, which made me not want to spend an entire book with her, but I was convinced by someone who had just read it that her traumatic past made up for her present unlikeability.

Eleanor has a meet-cute with her coworker Raymond, who is no real prize, but her heart is set on winning true love with a musician she saw at a concert. While she’s cultivating a friendship with Raymond, centered around a shared experience (helping an old man who fell and getting to know him and his family while he recovers) she’s meanwhile building up an elaborate fantasy life about the true love she will experience with the musician as soon as she can contrive to meet him.

The most fascinating part of this book is Eleanor’s loneliness. She describes loneliness as being like cancer, an illness which is too horrible to even mention by name. Every interaction she has looms especially large and important in her mind, even though they are all interactions in which she pays someone to do something for her, such as paint her nails or wax her undercarriage. When she meets Raymond’s mother or Sammy’s family (Sammy being the old man she and Raymond helped when he fell) she thinks about the interaction for a long time. When someone touches her, it has deep significance. This will resonate with anyone who’s been lonely. Her building friendship with Raymond is adorable. It’s not really a romance, as she’s pining for the musician and Raymond hooks up with someone else, but you can tell they’re starting to care about each other.

You get the sense that Eleanor is in a bad relationship with her mother and is deeply affected by something her mother did when Eleanor was ten. Eleanor distrusts do-gooding outsiders, especially therapists, because she has this deeply ingrained idea that it’s her family against the world. Her sense of superiority comes from her mother’s attitudes. For example, they only ate the best foods or nothing at all and she thinks of herself as a person who has excellent tastes. And yet Eleanor eats food from Tesco (which I imagine as a place like a cross between a Target and a Walmart, not a culinary wonderland). Every week Eleanor talks on the phone with her mother, who seems to be in prison, based by the timing of the phone calls and the deeply accented asides her mother has with someone else who seems to want to use the phone. Eleanor doesn’t like these phone calls, and tries to defend herself from her mother’s cruelty by withholding information and only revealing things which she thinks will gain her mother’s approval, but she usually doesn’t actually have the strength to not pick up the phone.

Eleanor’s would-be romance with the musician goes poorly, as you expect it might, and Eleanor has a psychological relapse. To me the most bizarre and exotic thing about this book is the idea that if you don’t show up for work for three days because of a mental health crisis, your employer would respond by giving you two months’ paid leave and then a gradual re-introduction to work. In the U.S., you’d be fired and then have to rely on savings until you were well enough to work again, and the emergency room visit would leave you in as much debt as if you had bought a new car and driven it into a frozen lake. (It must be nice to live in a civilized country.) As part of her treatment, Eleanor is sent to a therapist, but for some reason, this time she is more receptive to change. Eventually the therapist convinces Eleanor to reveal some of her history to the reader and then take the next, necessary step of severing her relationship with her mother. This relationship she has, where her mother doles out hurt and more hurt, with just enough approval to keep Eleanor tethered, really resonated with me. It felt very plausible and very real. This hurtful relationship is founded on Eleanor’s deep loneliness, which drives her to ally with the only person she has left. The mother has warped Eleanor to make Eleanor unlikeable so that Eleanor has to maintain a connection or risk having no one in her life at all. It’s only when Eleanor makes a friend that she’s able to break this unhealthy dynamic. It’s like the main theme of the book: if your family of origin is terrible, you have to make friends to become your new family. You feel for her, you wince at the hurtful things her mother says, and yet you kind of understand why she keeps picking up her land line every Wednesday night when her mother calls.

The only major flaw with this book was when someone said to the author “hey, you know what this book needs? A twist ending. Readers love twist endings!” and then they shoehorned in something unnecessary and implausible without going back carefully to make sure it fit with the rest of the book. Early in the book a social worker, who knows Eleanor’s entire story, says “you’re still talking with her? After everything that happened?” when Eleanor mentions she talks to her mother every week. That’s not something a responsible social worker would say if the pointless twist were true. Also, why would her mother call from prison with prison-schedule regularity and prison-authentic background asides if the pointless twist were true? Eleanor is a very literal person. She is blunt and honest and does not engage in subterfuge. She says “I don’t have any siblings and it makes me sad” which is true. It’s out of character for her to be lying when she says “I speak to my mother on the phone every Wednesday.” The twist ending was like garnishing an ahi tunasteak with marshmallow Peeps, like finishing off a black-tie look with a paper Burger King crown. It didn’t need to be there and it didn’t add any value but it was so obviously tacked on as an afterthought that it didn’t ruin the book because I simply pretended those few sentences didn’t happen. I mentally plucked off the twist ending and threw it into the garbage where it belonged. The rest of the book is worth reading.



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