“Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine” Review

By Minneh Kane

It is indeed quite a skill to get a person so engrossed in a work of art that they forget about themselves, and they forget about the artist. A work of art that made me feel this way is Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, the 2017 debut novel by Gail Honeyman.

The book takes me out of myself and throws me into a world that is at once exceedingly compelling and relatable and, at the same time, literally insane. I am so engrossed in the story that the characters on the page appear more real than the writer and sometimes, for that matter, than me, the reader.

The narrative is told from the first-person point of view of Eleanor Oliphant, a young Scottish woman living in Edinburgh. Eleanor is prescient and insightful as she describes the world around her. She sees the world as if she is a tourist in it, and it quickly becomes obvious that she is at the very least an unreliable narrator, if not completely insane. And yet the world she describes is so compelling you want to inhabit it with her. She has a wry sense of humor and irony.  Sometimes she is bitingly funny. She describes lunch with a colleague:

“‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ He wasn’t using a knife, but held a fork in his right hand like a child or an American. He smiled.”

But she is also clearly leading a dysfunctional life. She spends drunken weekends at home completely alone, downing bottles of vodka.

Early on in the story, Eleanor wins tickets to a music concert at an office lottery. At the concert she falls in love with one of the musicians as soon as she sees him on the stage. She starts making elaborate plans to meet him, and to eventually marry him. Her infatuation with the musician is clearly deranged and yet she talks about it so confidently that the reader is rooting for her to actually meet him and have a happy ending, but the reader also knows this is impossible and potentially very problematic. Indeed the reader at times feels alarmed for this musician who is being stalked by a deranged woman. 

It is clear that Eleanor Oliphant is troubled, but the narrative she tells is so convincing that one is drawn into her world.

In one scene, Eleanor and a colleague are sitting together having coffee, when the colleague asks her “are you seeing anyone at the moment”, and she answers “Yes.”  Then she elaborates “I’m seeing you right now, Raymond. You’re sitting right in front of me.” He laughs until he realizes she is not joking. Then he clarifies that he is asking whether she has a boyfriend. In that moment, the reader understands that Eleanor has been asked this question before, but in a context where the question was trying to ascertain whether or not she was hallucinating, and not just misreading social cues.

The technical skills of this author include the ability to render descriptions so vividly that you feel you are right there, and you are transported into this world of Eleanor Oliphant. The descriptions make you feel like you are there; you can see, hear, smell and taste the scene. It is so relatable that the reader accepts Eleanor’s world, despite that world being quite bizarre.

Descriptions of the mundane lull the reader into a sense of normalcy. It is then a jolt when something is thrown in that makes you realize that all is not as it seems. A good example is this passage. Eleanor has been offered a promotion and is not sure whether or not to take it. At the same meeting her boss asked her to organize the office Christmas party. These two things feel overwhelming, and she is sitting at her desk wondering how to process the situation.

“It might be helpful to talk to someone about it all, I realized. I remembered that from the past. Apparently, talking was good; it helped to keep anxieties in perspective. People had kept saying that. Talk to someone, do you want to talk about it, tell me how you feel, anything you want to share with the group, Eleanor? You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Miss Oliphant, can you tell us in your own words what you recall of the events that took place that evening? I felt a tiny trickle of sweat run down my back, and a fluttering in my chest like a trapped bird. The computer made that annoying ping which indicates the arrival of an electronic message. I clicked on it without thinking. How I despise these Pavlovian responses in myself!”

We get a glimpse of her madness, the "fluttering in my chest like a trapped bird” but then we go right back to the mundane with the description of the annoying ping made by the computer. Was she at one time a criminal defendant? She does not explain.

At times, her actions are clearly odd, like when she brings somebody a birthday present consisting of a half-empty bottle of vodka and some slabs of cheese from her fridge.

“I gave him his birthday present, which he seemed to find genuinely surprising. 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.”

After one particularly bizarre observation, the protagonist has this exchange with an acquaintance:

“‘You’re a bit mental, aren’t you?’ she said, not in the least aggressively, but slurring her words somewhat. It was hardly the first time I’d heard this. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, I suppose I am.’ She nodded, like I had confirmed a long-held suspicion. We didn’t talk after that.”

The power of this book is in rendering a protagonist who holds both sanity and insanity so remarkably well in the pages of the book. There is a spiritual magnitude in the way this novel insists on the humanity of a protagonist as flawed as Eleanor. This is also the story of a person who is living her life as a survivor of a big trauma that is always under the surface. The nature and magnitude of the trauma become clear as the story progresses.

Gail Honeyman is a Scottish writer and Eleanor Oliphant is particularly notable because it is her first novel. It received rave reviews and won several awards, including the Cista First Novel Award.  Eleanor Oliphant is a work of fiction and Honeyman has made it clear that her protagonist is not based on anyone in her life or that she knows of. Many of us, whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction, explore that boundary between real and unreal, remembered and not remembered, traumatic and mundane.  Honeyman touches on a feeling many of us have as we write our stories. The protagonist, Eleanor states at one point:

“It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”