Hi guys, today's is another Women's Prize video, this time on Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. Some people are expecting me to do a hatchet job on this one. I'm not going to.
Shere are positive things I want to talk about. But I also had a lot of problems with choices this author made and didn't have a great experience overall. Let's get into the plot.
Eleanor is a 30 year old woman living in Glasgow who goes to work in an office every day, has very little interaction with her co-workers, and goes home alone every night. She has no friends or close family and her most committed relationship is with a bottle of vodka. Eleanor is in denial that there's any problem with this kind of life.
She doesn't like other humans very much. She finds them irritating and bewildering and she feels self-sufficient. But throughout the book there are hints that there's some sort of trauma in her past involving her horrible mother and we know that this trauma has deeply affected her. Shere are two early inciting incidents.
One is that Eleanor becomes infatuated with a local rock star and so decides to make herself more fashionable to get his attention and the other is that she and one of her co-workers workers Raymond, Helplp, and Elderly Man one day. And this leads to all three becoming friendlier with one another. First I want to talk about the positives.
Maybe my favorite thing about this book is that in a lot of ways Eleanor is truly unlikable. It happens a lot that a character who's supposedly socially challenged or unpopular is actually super likable and adept once they're put into social situations. She whole outcast thing can be done really lazily and Eleanor is a true outcast. She has a lot of horrid thoughts about people and can be rude.
So when she goes to get a manicure, she's helped by a very young manicurist, and when this girl asks her at the end what she thinks of the final product, Eleanor responds, well I could have done exactly the same thing myself and saved a lot of money. And from Eleanor's perspective, she's just telling the truth, but she doesn't think about this girl's feelings. When she meets a woman with large teeth, this is what she thinks. She had done her best, but nothing could change the size of them, I supposed. Shey belonged in a far bigger mouth.
Perhaps not even a human one. I was reminded of a photograph that She Telegraph had featured some time ago of a monkey which had grabbed a camera and taken its own grinning photograph, a selfie. She poor woman. An adjective which one would never wish to have applied to one's teeth was simian.
And there's a lot of that kind of actual bitchiness in how she views the world and how she treats other people. Which in a weird way made me root for her more than if she'd been sweeter or more palatable. And which makes it believable that she doesn't have.
friends so that it's meaningful when she starts becoming friends with Raymond. Sheir relationship is another plus. To me it's a testament to friendship and the power that a lot of us take for granted. That someone will care how we feel and hope good things happen to us and all the other forms of support, large and small, that we get from our friends. And I like that their relationship becomes warmer but remains ambiguous so that it's not a cookie cutter romance plot.
It's not so much a ban- for Eleanor's past as it is a bomb and a fresh start. A lot has been made of the humor. I didn't think this wasn't a specially funny book but there are definitely charming moments.
A cat appears later in the narrative and like every description of the cat to me was spot-on and super funny. Also with Eleanor being ruthlessly blunt you get moments like this one where a man asks her if you can buy her a drink and she responds, no thank you. I don't want to accept a drink from you because then I would be obliged.
to purchase one for you in return and I'm afraid I'm simply not interested in spending two drinks worth of time with you. And throughout there are lots of pithy one-liners that I appreciated. She last good or maybe neutral bit is something that's possibly controversial. I think the portrayal of trauma is fine. I was thinking about this book in relation to something like A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which in a very different way also features trauma, to put it mildly.
And I was asking myself questions like, does trauma have to be the main focus of a book to be... dealt with well. Does a book have to announce itself as a serious book to handle a serious topic? And the answer to both those questions for me is no. But it seems that some readers feel comfortable with fictionalized trauma only if it dominates the narrative and gets an in-depth examination that it shouldn't be a side feature.
Now, I don't think this book deserves any kudos for the way it handles Eleanor's traumatic backstory. It's about as unimaginative as it gets in that respect. And the one concern I have with it is there's a strong that this trauma is supposed to explain and to a certain extent redeem all of her bad qualities.
That they can all be traced back to these specific origins. And that's not how humans work. But I also don't think this emotional damage is minimized or handled insensitively. But this novel didn't work for me and the reasons for that boil down to two related things. One, this character is preposterous and two, this book is transparently manipulative.
Now I know that a ton of people have connected to Eleanor Oliphant. Shey've laughed and cried with her, but I personally couldn't feel anything for this person because I was reminded time and again that she wasn't a person, not even for her author. And it's not the mere fact that she's an unbelievable character that's necessarily the problem. Shere are lots of far-fetched characters and novels who I've grown attached to. It's the way Eleanor is unbelievable.
For one thing, she is a set of finite, clearly defined traits and behaviors that pop up again and again and again. Helpre are the five major parts of Eleanor Oliphant. 1. She has a large and quite formal vocabulary. 2. She complains about or judges other humans. 3. She's confused by situations that any human who has lived in the world would understand.
4. She fantasizes about the rock star and her future life with him. 5. She thinks about how sad and lonely she is while simultaneously claiming that she's not sad or lonely. As the book progresses, we get a sixth trait. Eleanor reflecting on how surprisingly nice human interaction can be. That's it.
Those are her mannerisms, thoughts, responses, priorities, all in a nutshell. I challenge you to define anyone in your life so neatly. She's really one gimmick after another in a way that's mechanical.
If you were to color-code the six details I mentioned, You would find them appearing throughout this book with an almost rigid regularity. Like I mentioned in Trait number 3, there are tons of scenes where Eleanor is portrayed as clueless. Sometimes they're believable and it's funny or sad that she doesn't understand something. But often the author takes this schtick way too far.
Take this scene where Eleanor is discussing Christmas lunch venues with her coworkers. Apparently it's been narrowed down to TGI Fridays because it's a laugh. Helpre, I tried out a little finger-waggling gesture indicating quotation marks, which I'd seen Janie, a coworker, doing once and had stored away for future reference.
I think I carried it off with a plum. Eleanor has been in contact with many different kinds of people throughout her life. She attended public school as a child, then lived with several foster families, and finally went to university before getting this office job.
She's not a social butterfly, but she's not a Martian. Surely she has seen somebody before this point using the quotation mark sign. Why make such a big deal out of this?
Even after she's eating at a Mcdonald, and here are some of her thoughts. I am no epicure. However, surely it is a culinary truth universally acknowledged that fish and cheese do not go together? Someone really ought to tell Mr. McDonald. I began to suspect that Mr. McDonald was a very foolish man indeed, although judging from the undiminished Q, a wealthy one.
Shese aren't marked as jokes the way Eleanor's intentionally humorous moments usually are, so I'm being asked to swallow that this woman doesn't understand what Mcdonald is. Shere are so many other instances like these where the author sacrifices the character's integrity for a cheap laugh, not even for anything integral to the narrative or side-splittingly funny. She is just trying to elicit a dippy little chortle and doesn't care that her protagonist suffers for it.
And here's where we get to the larger issue. Honeyman is a constant presence in this novel, to the detriment of Eleanor, if you can even separate this creation from her creator. Which is most obvious whenever the text drops hints about Eleanor's past or tries to inspire sympathy for her.
Sometimes these hints are subtle and do add to the story. I mean, we're in Eleanor's first-person perspective and Anne Honeyman has to have some way of alluding to the past and to Eleanor's loneliness. But the book tries to have it both ways, where Eleanor is tough and matter-of-fact on the one hand, and vulnerable to an almost melodramatic extent on the other.
She has lived with no love or affection or even kindness for a long time. That takes a kind of steely resolve and a serious dose of denial. She also doesn't fall apart when recounting certain bad things that have happened to her. Shere's a paragraph where she's talking about something entirely separate, and then she just drops in that her ex-boyfriend used to beat her before continuing on nonchalantly. And there are clear indications that she doesn't grasp the extent of her alcoholism.
and doesn't acknowledge that she has emotional needs as well as physical ones. If this is how this character is presented to us, then it's odd that there's so many heavy-handed lines where she practically begs for the reader's compassion. Shere's a really nice section where Eleanor comes to the conclusion that she's not a gorgeous woman, she's looking in the mirror and she's looking at the scars on her face, but that she's a human woman. No more, no less.
But this is how the section ends. Shere 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. Does that sound like someone who's unaware of her emotional needs?
At one point Eleanor meets Raymond's mother and he mentions for the first time that he has a sister. Help hadn't forgotten, I supposed. Help'd simply taken his sibling for granted.
An unchanging, unremarkable fact of life, not even worthy of mention. It was impossible for me to imagine such a scenario, alone as I was. Only Mummy and I inhabit the Oliphant world. His mother was still talking.
Denise was eleven when Raymond came along. A wee surprise and a blessing, so he was. She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself.
That's something. No one had ever looked at me like that, but I'd be able to recognize it if they ever did. I'm sorry, but by page 106 we've been reminded so many times that Eleanor is alone, and this moment is the equivalent of posting neon lights saying, feel sorry for her.
And then in the middle of a random scene we get this monologue, which if you're at all confused about the book's messages at this point, spells them out for you. Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there's something very liberating about it. Once you realize that you don't need anyone, you can take care of yourself.
That's the thing. It's best just to take care of yourself. You can't protect other people, however hard you try.
You try, and you fail, and your world collapses around you, burns down to ashes. That said, I did sometimes wonder what it would be like to have someone, a cousin, say, or a sibling, to call in in times of need, or even just to spend unplanned time with. Someone who knows you. cares about you, who wants the best for you.
Pointless even to speculate though. I had no one and it was futile to wish it were otherwise. It's not inherently contradictory for a tough character to also be vulnerable, but that dichotomy is played so thickly in here that the vulnerable moments read more like authorial intrusions than genuine revelations.
It made me think of my cousin, Sophia, who's 12 now, but when she was younger, she was one of those really performative kids who would do something comical or crazy. and then peek up at you to make sure you were watching and to get your reaction. I felt like this book was clearly signposting every reaction I was supposed to have and then peeking up at me to be like, look, wasn't that funny?
Wasn't that clever? Ooh, didn't that line just break your heart? She tension in Eleanor's character between hiding and revealing her emotional state also made me think of a Man Keys book called Rachel's Holiday, where the narrator, Rachel, is a drug addict, but she's in denial about it. And because it's first person, the reader really doesn't get the extent of her problem until a good chunk of the way through the book.
You might have an inkling that she's not always telling the truth, but in her eyes, she's fine. And so you have to take her word for it until Rachel comes to understand her own problem. In Eleanor Alphen, the whole, I'm completely fine theme is paper thin from the start because the author wants to control how you feel about her instead of actually letting Eleanor try to convince you that she's fine. Like I said, plenty of novels are peppered with characters you wouldn't expect to meet in real life.
But the problem is that this book is entirely Eleanor's voice. That's the whole experience and so much is riding on you connecting with her. So that when that voice is compromised, the whole narrative is compromised, all the messages about loneliness and friendship and recovery become undermined by the fact that they're force-fed to you in their most basic forms by a voice that sounds like the author.
And I know that I'll be accused of thinking too much about all of this, that I should have just enjoyed this book. And I've already gotten several messages to the effect That a book is successful if it's emotionally engaging. And plenty of people have loved this, so why do I need to swoop in and overanalyze the joy out of everything? To which I have a few responses.
If you have to turn your brain off to become emotionally invested in a book, that author's work lacks emotional integrity. Intellect isn't the enemy of emotion. And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that anyone who did enjoy this book had to turn their brains off to do so. Like, no.
Just that I don't appreciate when people suggest that I'd enjoy anything more if I thought less. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. And I don't find this book lacking because the language isn't complicated enough. I've said before that it annoys me when people treat a book like it's super literary just because it has convoluted, wordy writing. Hard doesn't equal good.
She Lonely Helparts Hotel, Hagseed, and She Gustav Sonata are three books from last year's long list. that are written simply and cleanly. And the first two are ones I would categorize as super fun, breezy reads.
But they all also have noteworthy literary qualities and specific artistic visions. Basically, I can see why so many elements of this one have appealed to so many readers. And a book doesn't need to be great to be lovable. I love plenty of books that are formulaic and not that great.
But when a group of judges is asked to assess this book artistically, I don't understand how it gets any acknowledgement over plenty of other books that attempt so much more and that don't take so many cheap shortcuts. So it comes down to what you believe the purpose of a literary prize is. A lot of people think that if the judges read a book, they think a lot of readers would like that they should pass that book along.
And that's a valid opinion. But I personally don't want to close a prize book. and wonder if the judges cared about artistry at all.
You guys, this comment section is gonna be a bloodbath and I knew that as soon as I started having problems with this book. But I appreciate all of you in advance who express whatever opinions you have passionately and politely, which is the vast majority of you. So share your thoughts below, whether you agree or disagree, and I'll see you soon for another Women's Prize Review. Bye guys.
Thanks for watching.