“Eileen” adopts convention and dips it into murky Moshfeghian brown, which is more staunch bleakness and delightful filth than any antique sepia. Moshfegh has a brown voice, soft and full as beer, sure - but other brown things too: earthy, mundane, unassuming, fertile, even fecal.īut compared with her debut, last year’s celebrated novella, “McGlue,” and many of her stories (published in places like the Paris Review), the novel “Eileen” is Moshfegh’s most conventional work, almost classical by her canon, and yet my guess is many will join me in finding it her best work yet. One of my favorite lines in poetry is the opener to Anne Sexton’s 1962 “For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God,” which begins, “God has a brown voice,/ as soft and full as beer.” These lines swill around in my head whenever I enter one of the strange universes of Ottessa Moshfegh.
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