Review| Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I feel as though I am on a first date with this book. Externally, I am doing my very best to keep it cool, whilst my inner dialogue shouts, “I think I’m in love!!!”. Which may explain why it was so difficult to write this review. I read the book two weeks ago, but have been unable to produce a decent write-up. Oh, well. Here goes nothing.

It is worth noting that Ms. Eleanor Oliphant would not wish us, complete strangers to her, to presume a first-name basis. Begging her pardon, and keeping in mind that she is, after all, a fictional character, let’s call her Eleanor.

Eleanor is proper, opinionated, and entirely unable to read social cues. She is prone to blurt out whatever comes to her mind, and frequently finds fault in others. Her coworkers make fun of her when they think she is not listening. She speaks with her mother, regularly on Wednesday evenings. Her mother (incidentally, one of the most deliciously hateful characters I’ve encountered in a book) seems even less fond of her than her coworkers. Not surprisingly, Eleanor lives alone. She is filled with heartbreaking loneliness. She questions her own existence:

“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”.

Then, two things happen. First, she goes to a concert and sees onstage, leading the band, her soul mate. Never mind that he’s unaware of her existence, Eleanor is infatuated:

“His eyes were light brown. They were light brown in the way that a rose is red, or that the sky is blue. They defined what it meant to be light brown”.

Secondly, she meets Raymond, the IT guy for her office. Though Raymond falls short of Eleanor’s standards of attire, hygiene, and social graces, they become friends:

“He had his hands in the pockets of his low-slung denim trousers, and was wearing a strange oversized woolen hat that I hadn’t seen before. It looked like the kind of hat that a German goblin might wear in an illustration from a nineteenth-century fairy tale, possibly one about a baker who was unkind to children and got his comeuppance via an elfin horde. I rather liked it”.

Through her friendship with Raymond, and a series of other new relationships and experiences, Eleanor’s life slowly begins to transform.

It is difficult to fault Eleanor, despite the fact that she is deeply scarred by a childhood tragedy that she either can’t or won’t recall, her personality can be a bit off-putting, she may be an alcoholic (at least on the weekends), and she is most certainly delusional. She is also outrageously funny, intelligent, strong, and touching. She may not be completely fine, but she is certainly doing her best. In this way, the book is a kind of root-for-the-underdog, late-blooming coming-of-age story, that will captivate you from start to finish.

This is a debut novel for Gail Honeyman. I hope she’s started writing another book, because, (though I’m trying desperately to keep it cool), I’m in love.