Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a 2019
literary fiction novel by Gail Honeyman. It was published by Penguin
Randomhouse in 2019 and became a New York Times bestseller. Reese
Witherspoon selected it as one of her book club picks and it’s going to become
a motion picture in the near future.
The novel follows the titular character Eleanor Oliphant, an
accounting clerk in her late twenties living a very lonely and strictly
scheduled life. Everything changes when she meets her new coworker Raymond who
is determined to find a way to bring Eleanor out of her shell. Along the way,
his big heart helps her repair her own heavily damaged one.
To start off, I’d like to point out that this book is not a
romance. I know the blurb written above, which I paraphrased from the back of
the book, makes it sound like one, but its not. The novel isn’t the story of a
man and a woman meeting unexpectedly and falling in love. Instead, it’s a story
about an unlikely friendship and said friendship being that catalyst in Eleanor
realizing some difficult truths about herself and her past.
This book was recommended to me by a coworker. She’d begun
reading it and thought it was an amusing story, which it is at first. At the
beginning, Eleanor’s inner monologue is funny. She doesn’t have great social
skills, she doesn’t know how to relate to people and doesn’t have a filter.
She’s, for lack of a better term, a weirdo and spends a lot of time judging
people for perfectly normal behavior that she finds strange. At first,
Eleanor’s eccentricities were funny. I was reading about a story about an
incredibly strange woman who was wondering why everyone else seemed so strange
to her. Before long, however, it stopped being funny. Because Eleanor’s whole
life, a boring job, no real connections to anyone, adhering to a strict schedule,
is the result of a very troubled upbringing. She strives to be normal, but her
childhood makes any idea of “normal” completely impossible. There are small
moments of humor, but mostly the book is rather sad.
I don’t want to make it seem like I didn’t enjoy this book,
because I did. It was a thorough deep-dive into self-discovery and
self-improvement. It also delves into discussion trauma and how it can affect
people. The author went out of her way to show Eleanor going through a major
change in her life without it changing her personality completely. Eleanor
still has her quirks at the end of the book, and she wouldn’t be described as
“normal” but she’s in a healthier place. She’s stopped ignoring her problems
and confronted some of the issues she’s been burying for so long.
Eleanor is an interesting character, although a tad bit
annoying at times. Scenes where she’s being overly judgmental towards people
for doing things like not knowing how to respond to something she said, or
trying to have a conversation with her are hard to read. Her inability to
relate to people makes sense in the context of the story, but until it becomes
clear that there’s more to her than just that, she’s difficult to like. Raymond
is one of the first people Eleanor really lets in because he seems to accept
her exactly as she is. Sure, sometimes if she says something that’s
inappropriate he’ll tell her, but he’s not trying to change her. He realizes
that she’s not doing well, and wants to help her, but not in a way that’s self-serving.
She’s his friend and he wants his friend to get better. Even in moments when
Eleanor doesn’t want his help, but needs it. Another character that changes
Eleanor’s life is an elderly man Sammy. Shortly after Eleanor and Raymond meet,
they save Sammy when he falls and injures himself. Raymond continues to check
in on Sammy after he’s taken to the hospital and talks Eleanor into joining
him. During these visits, Eleanor starts to open up a bit more to both men and
for the first time in a long time, develops a real connection with other
people. The last character I want to discuss, and the one who had the biggest
impact on Eleanor by far, is Mummy, her mother. Eleanor doesn’t see Mummy but
at the beginning of the novel, they talk over the phone every Wednesday night.
Mummy is a piece of work to say the least. Several of their calls are depicted
in the story, but you only need one to understand their relationship dynamic.
Mummy is a terrible mother, abusive in more than one way, and yet everything Eleanor
does is in an attempt to please her mother. Mummy is the antagonist of this
story, and her connection to Eleanor’s trauma is what propels the story
forward.
I liked Eleanor’s character journey. I like the realizations
she came to along the way as she let more people in and realized that she wasn't “fine” regardless of how often she claimed to be. What I liked most, however,
was that the ending didn’t wrap everything up neatly. Eleanor doesn’t end the
book by being completely recovered from her trauma. There isn’t a happy ending,
just a realistic one. She’s getting better, her life has improved, but she
still has a long way to go.
I didn’t love this book. I also didn’t hate it. I wish that
the blurb adhered a little closer to the actual story than it did. Still, it’s
an entertaining slice-of-life story while also discussing heavier themes. I’m
not eagerly awaiting the motion picture, unlike some other readers I've talked to, but it’s a good book overall.
Rating: 2.9 stars
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