As with many of the other books I’ve read lately, I am divided in my opinion about Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman. It has been a popular book and its Goodreads rating is at 4.25—which is very impressive—but I both liked it and didn’t like it. Eleanor is engaging, one hundred per cent, and Honeyman’s writing is really good, but the plotting was full of strange choices, sometimes ones that seemed like they wanted more to be trendy than to do the thing that was right for the story and/or characters themselves. I wouldn’t say not to read it. But I would talk you down a few notches before beginning, because—among many other things—therapy is not a proper story resolution nor is  a story’s truth always consistent with the author’s opinion of it, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Eleanor Oliphant is in her late twenties, successful at her job but completely out to sea when it comes to anything involving any other human beings. She’s quirky, sure, but she’s also incapable of understanding the people around her and revels in her isolation. When she attends a random band show with a coworker, she sets eyes on the handsome musician who she decides is obviously the man she is destined to be with. So she starts to reason and plan her way toward their special, “chance” meeting, the mysterious Mummy devilishly encouraging her from the background. While the reader is trying to figure out what on earth has happened with this Mummy that would make Eleanor so hurt, bizarre, limited, isolated, and an orphan, the real human contact ensues between Eleanor and a new co-worker who both draws Eleanor out and disgusts her. How did life get this way for Eleanor? And how long can she sustain it before it—or she—falls apart?

Let’s see. I found Eleanor Oliphant to be very disjointed, both in tone and even in the characters as they appear in the first and second “halves” of the book. (They are not perfect halves, the first of two distinct spirit-sections being longer than the second.) At first, the book is depressing and close (even while somewhat interesting). Also, I definitely thought Oliphant was on the autism spectrum (and we’ll talk more about that in a bit). The book is very tense and I had the feeling there were both some horrible thing in the past and something horrifying just around the next corner. But then all of a sudden I was at the terrible event but it didn’t deliver, it wasn’t that bad, though Eleanor’s reaction was what I expected as far as stakes were concerned (which made that pretty strange because the climactic event wasn’t that exciting). Then the characters and tone got much cheerier and lighter and the tension transferred to finding out what happened in the past—which almost delivered but for like one whole sentence or something and that was IT… cheery again. (Also, I saw all the twists coming. Some people who didn’t were annoyed because the big twist was unnecessary to the story and therefore felt sensationalist but not authentic or even accurate to clues given earlier. I agree with them. One of the lists I found in a review about why the twist doesn’t work was impressive, I thought, and very convincing.) Anyhow, because of the incongruence of the tone and characters and the lack of delivery on the big moments (including an open ending regarding the romance), I just can’t be as excited about this book as some people are.

Plus, I was really confused about Eleanor. I totally read her as on the spectrum, and it turns out I was far from the only one. Like, I had no doubts until there were some clues that the author was not on that same page. I am familiar with trauma and, to a lesser extent, autism. Eleanor behaved and thought like she was a poster child for someone who is on the spectrum and kinda-sorta functional. If Honeyman wanted us to think about the similarities between trauma reactions and autism, she could have done that, but that’s not what she was doing, so I and many other readers were left confused by Honeyman’s insistence that Eleanor is definitely not autistic. And by the end, I believed Honeyman, except I didn’t. Sure, Eleanor seemed off the spectrum by the end, but that didn’t feel at all believable considering the Eleanor I had just been reading about for hundreds of pages—the one who appeared to be both on the spectrum and have trauma which was not successfully dealt with. And while it’s of note that the author says Eleanor is definitely not autistic, I don’t think that’s the end of the discussion. (What an author says about a book doesn’t always match up with the reader experience, and sometimes the truth of the matter seems to lay heavier with the reader(s).) Then again, since Eleanor at the beginning and Eleanor at the end seem so different… I’m not sure it’s a discussion worth having. It feels more like a writer mistake.

Still, there are some virtues to extol in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. It has been wildly popular, a first novel of a woman in her 50s (who has not announced any more specific projects since its publication in 2017). The book is definitely funny. Eleanor is a very compelling character (though I was so WORRIED because of my read on her—so while I was fascinated by her I was also a bit stressed out). The adjective of choice in the reviews for Eleanor is “quirky.” She’s also Scottish and it was nice to have a novel set in Scotland, for a change. (I refuse to count the Outlander series.)

In the end, I would have advised Honeyman to follow her characters through their story, which would mean Eleanor was still on the spectrum at the end, the climax would have been much more horrific (leaving her much more maligned and hurt), the twist would not have been there or we would have found out earlier, and we would have spent way less time in the therapy room (because, I’m sorry because I WAY believe in therapy, but therapy as a resolution to a story is boring as crap). Also, Raymond and Eleanor would have actually resolved, romantically. I think Honeyman was trying to have a big twist and avoid a conventional romance because those things are hip right now, but neither of those choices fit Eleanor or Eleanor Oliphant, unfortunately. I appreciate Honeyman trying to give us a character to identify with all the loneliness that the Pandemic and modern life has brought us. The book is full of fun insight and engaging snark, and it has enjoyable characters and situations, but it ends up being a strange cocktail of bitter and sweet.

QUOTES:

“I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination” (p5).

“The goal, ultimately, was successful camouflage as a human woman” (p26).

“When the silence and aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life. / A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a potted plant, is she certifiable?” (p51).

“Eyelids are really just flesh curtains. Your eyes are always ‘on,’ always looking” (p72).

“[The shiatsu head massage] ended about nine hours before I would have liked it to” (p149).

“LOL could take a running jump. I wasn’t made for illiteracy; it simply didn’t come naturally. Although it’s good to try new things and to keep an open mind, it’s also extremely important to stay true to who you really are. I read that in a magazine at the hairdressers” (p174).

“I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change” (p182).

“I’d made my legs black, and my hair blond. I’d lengthened and darkened my eyelashes, dusted a flush of pink onto my cheeks and painted my lips a shade of dark red which was rarely found in nature. I should, by rights, look less like a human woman than I’d ever done, and yet it seemed that this was the most acceptable, the most appropriate appearance that I’d ever made before the world. It was puzzling” (p191).

“Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high” (p198).

“I couldn’t keep passing through life, over it, under it, around it. I couldn’t go on haunting the world like a wraith” (p220).

“If they liked you—and, I remembered, Raymond and I had agreed that we were pals now—then, it seemed, they were prepared to maintain contact, even if you were sad, or upset, or behaving in very challenging ways. This was something of a revelation” (p236).

“If someone said, Please could you describe yourself in two words, and you said, ‘Erm… let me see… Angry and Sad?’ then that really wouldn’t be good” (p251).

“I know she’s only a cat. But it’s still love; animals, people. It’s unconditional, and it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world” (p286).

MOVIE:

Forthcoming from Reese Witherspoon and her Happy Sunshine company.