I knew Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman had been successful, but I’d no idea how successful until the book stats came out last year. This was a runaway bestseller, getting hundreds of thousands more purchases than the next novel in the list – at least according to the list I read. When my book group chose to do it, I was a little dubious. Other mammoth bestsellers of recent years have definitely been low on quality – i.e. The Da Vinci Code. Well, I was happy to be proved wrong. This is a case where I think the hype was pretty justified.
In case you’re one of those others who’ve yet to read it – the novel is from the perspective of Eleanor Oliphant, who works in finance administration and lives alone. She isn’t very at ease socially, largely because she doesn’t understand the ways that people choose to spend their time. She has very little popular culture knowledge, and tends to speak as a mix between an eighteenth-century novel and a computer manual. (Her dialogue – never using abbreviations; overly elaborate sentences – never quite made sense to me as a concept, but we’ll leave that be.)
It’s also clear that she is not completely fine.
Gradually we piece together that something traumatic happened to her as a child, and it has continued to affect the way she engages with other people. She also longs for a way out of the loneliness she experiences. It was an interesting coincidence that the epigraph was from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I’m reading at the moment. Living alone definitely doesn’t have to mean loneliness, but Eleanor feels isolated from the rest of humanity. And her attempts to cross this divide are usually frustrated by her inability to understand social codes – and often not particularly liking the range of options in front of her.
This changes when she sees a handsome young singer. She realises she is in love, and destined to be with him. He will be the solution to her problems.
Honeyman takes us on a compelling journey with Eleanor, as she tries to orchestrate ways to get closer to the singer. At the same time, she has made her first friend – Raymond, a colleague who can see past her off-putting traits. At the same time, we continue to learn more about her past. Honeyman gives us enough info to guess and make assumptions, and little enough that we’re desperate to get more answers. It’s really impressively judged. So often, this sort of bread-crumb-dropping is just annoying, whereas Honeyman knows exactly how much info to give, and when. And even when I thought I’d worked it out, I hadn’t.
It’s a relatively long book, but very compelling – I raced through it in a couple of days. As mentioned, I’m not sure all the verbal tics quite made sense, but I did like that Eleanor is an anomaly but not repellent. Plenty of people in the book think she’s being funny when she’s really just answering their questions differently from how they anticipated. Her colleagues find her hard to talk to, but warm to her when she tries different approaches.
Oh, and there is the most wonderful CAT!
For a debut novel, it’s very impressive. I’m intrigued to see what comes next – and what the film will be like. It’s good to be a part of the zeitgeist sometimes!
I’ve been put off a little by the buzz si haven’t read it yet, but was curious to hear what you made of it.
I have been looking forward to your review of this Simon. I am one of those who hasn’t yet read it. However, a friend gave it me for Christmas so I really should get to it. I am intrigued by your comments about the dialogue, and overall I think I will rather like Eleanor.
We looked at it in our book group, and therefore I actually read it as opposed to just seeing it on the best seller shelves. We were impressed and most enjoyed it immensely, finding the character of Eleanor intriguing, infuriating and essentially sympathetic. When I first started it I had to put it down for a few days as I found it too involving and it overtook my thoughts too much. I had worked out the ending quite early on, but there were still surprises.This month we are reading “The Diary of a Provincial Lady” which is a bit different…! Thanks for this review, Simon – I am glad someone else was a bit late to the party.
Eleanor presents very much as someone on the Autism spectrum might. It is an interesting book. I really enjoyed it.
My book group read this recently and it engendered one of the longest discussions about a book we all liked, for various reasons. It is an amazing achievement for a debut novel, and it will be interesting to read her next book. One of our group, a retired psychiatrist, did work out the situation with Eleanor’s mother much earlier in the story than the rest of us – insider knowledge!
I enjoyed rather than loved this book, racing through it. We had loads of discussion about it in the staff room at school over if Eleanor was ‘on the spectrum’ or not – something the author never says in the book but she has since stated that Eleanor has PTSD… not everyone was convinced by that.
I also read this recently with a book group. Because the library queue was so long, I bought a copy, and I’m very glad I did. From the US/American cover, I was expecting something along the lines of Bridget Jones, so I was initially a bit confused – but also immediately drawn into the story. It led to one of the best discussions we’ve had in a long time.
Well, okay, I was resisting this book for a long time because I thought it was going to be one of those cloying, contrived feel-good books, but it doesn’t sound like it. You’ve convinced me to read it.
Glad you liked a book published in this century! LOL. I liked it as well, though sometimes the mix of humorous and serious didn’t quite work for me. But ultimately Eleanor charmed me as a character.
I really enjoyed this book: I thought it was funny, clever and very touching. It is SO difficult to predict with those big bestsellers – it can easily go either way.
I’m with you – I knew this one was big, but not THAT BIG, until it was ranked #1 in the Dymocks Top 101 for 2019. Wowser! I’ve just picked up a copy and I’m looking forward to reading it – I’m not letting myself get sucked into the hype, but if nothing else I’m DEATHLY curious! ❤️