"Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She
struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s
thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding
social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and
phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the
bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond
together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the
three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of
isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will
ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one." For the most part, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is a dazzling debut novel, filled with darkness, humor, and out- right charm. Eleanor is not original in many senses –she’s like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, combined with Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet, if you please) from Keeping Up Appearances and a few other odd-ball traces we’ve seen on TV and movies over the decades- but she is clearly smart, enduring and very, very damaged.
Honeyman’s prose is addictive and there a number of passages that made
me laugh out loud (the whole waxing scene was brilliant comedy gold) while
equally there were many parts that were sad (her childhood is slowly revealed
as the book goes on, and it is pretty horrible). It takes a good writer to
balance the humor –which ping-ponged between broad jokes, observational humor,
social cues, and outright snark.
While Eleanor’s back-story slowly comes life (as her present life
begins to unravel), you can see where Honeymoon was subtlety dropping hints
(and for fans of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte will see where this book was
going), but I did guess early on about her relationship with her Mummy and
their weekly conversations. I mean, at first it wasn’t obvious, but eventually
you catch on here.
And while I did mention Sheldon form the popular TV series, it’s not
meant to cast Eleanor as someone on the autism spectrum. I’ve read that some
people believed this because she did not pick up social clues, had little or no
knowledge of pop culture, but knew a great detail about a lot of odd things. You knew early on she was damaged in some way in her youth, so I felt connected
to her because of this, understood some
of things she talked about (like being alone: “Some people, weak people, fear
solitude. What they fail to understand is there’s something very liberating
about it; once you realize that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of
yourself”). I can also see why she compartmentalized her life, as this is
something I have done about my own childhood and now my adult life. Still, I
can talk about it somewhat, but getting over it seems difficult. I’ve never
been one to fully understand the part about maintaining a healthy relationship
with friends and family. Committing to being fully present is difficult for me,
as I’ve been flying on autopilot for the last four decades. It’s not perfect,
but for Eleanor, like me it’s best I can do.
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