Eleanor Oliphant is not completely fine. If she was completely fine she’d be like this very well-known dog meme by now.
But in all honesty, we can’t really confirm that Eleanor Oliphant is not completely fine until the end of the book. All in all, Eleanor’s life seems pretty ordinary. She’s got an admin job in a creative agency where the rockstars of the office are graphic designers. She doesn’t really have any friends, and she’s generally alright with that. The highlight of her week is getting smashed with vodka on the Friday night and passing out on the couch. Her colleagues kind of makes fun of her behind her back on how socially awkward she is.
For example, she went to a concert with one of her male colleagues and out of nowhere ran home. That was the catalyst for Eleanor, who found her life’s purpose was to make the lead singer of the band she just watched, Johnny Lomond, to fall in love with her. It turned her inside out, from a reclusive caterpillar to an awkward social butterfly trying to catch up to societal expectations (and perhaps exceed it). Well, maybe she fell a bit short there on the course of her pursuits, as the only friends she made was her IT guy, Raymond and the family of a man that they rescued after he fell on the street.
But the existence of the lead singer now justifies her own — she started to go for wildly expensive manicures, even getting a Hollywood for her hoo-ha (means everything’s off) just in case things get hot and heavy with the love of her life, she purchases trendy dresses — all which cost her some coin. But for the sake of capturing Johnny Lomond’s attention she’s going all out. She takes on more social challenges, such as accepting Raymond’s invitations as practice to sharpen her social saw blades. But in doing this, she finds that human connection isn’t so bad after all. She struck up a friendship easily with Raymond’s mother and was genuinely touched by her affection.
We don’t know much about Eleanor’s past but we only get glimpses of what had happened to her — the scars on her face, her unmissable weekly conversation with her mother, the cycle of social workers that drops in every now and then to check up on her. It doesn’t take us long to figure out that she is a product of the system. She has flashes of memory of her sister, who’s obviously no longer in her life. Even as a reader, we find Eleanor awkward. As the story is told from Eleanor’s perspective in first person, we can only shake our heads at her knowing that the world doesn’t really work as she thinks. If you’ve read The Rosie Project then you would know the gist of the tone.
Both Eleanor Oliphant and The Rosie Project are humorous — they both take advantage of the social irony to expose our own hypocrisy of how we treat social recluses, especially those with a mental conditions. For Don in The Rosie Project it is autism, for Eleanor, it is deep trauma. How do we know somebody’s background and what they’re going through? We can only assume. As much as we’d like to laugh at Eleanor’s poor financial decision to pursue a hopeless case that is her presumed true love, we can only sympathise with her. Heck I was fifteen once and was going for impossible romances myself.
The novel explores the detrimental effects of loneliness. Eleanor’s reclusiveness only fed her routines and makes her own personal shell stronger and more comfortable, thus enhancing her own personal reality. This is a double-edged sword as she becomes increasingly more and more distant from others’ social reality. When she tries to barge her way back into reconnecting with people (in particular her love interest), she had to relearn everything all over again. This is not a bad thing as she finds human connection more of a positive than a negative — she feels warm after connecting with people.
I guess my issues with the novel is in the tone and language. It is a personal preference more than anything, so I guess it is not exactly a fault. The ending of the novel caught me off guard, when Eleanor’s past is finally revealed, and we can now piece two and two together. The novel is deceptively light-hearted, but the themes are heavy: mental health, trauma and coping mechanisms. But deep down, no matter sympathetic the cause, I cannot like Eleanor Oliphant. Something about her puts me off.
To judge whether I like a character, I always ask me myself if I’d go for a beer in a local pub with him or her. I wouldn’t pursue a beer with Eleanor and it’s unlikely that she’d ask me for one, so let’s leave it at that.
