Fiction Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Every once in a while, you meet a literary character who steals your heart. Eleanor Oliphant is one of those characters. The novel that features her, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is warm, moving, engrossing, and very funny, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

Twenty-nine-year-old Eleanor is satisfied with her life. She works as an accountant in an office, barely speaks to her colleagues, goes out to the same place every day to pick up a sandwich for lunch which she eats in the staff room while she reads the newspaper and does the crossword. On Fridays, she picks up a frozen pizza, a bottle of wine, and two bottles of vodka, goes home to her small, shabbily-furnished apartment, and spends the weekend alone with the vodka "spread...throughout both days so I am neither drunk nor sober." Eleanor feels her life is fine - and she will tell you that if anyone ever happened to ask - but she does recognize her isolation:

"It often feels as if I'm not here, that I'm a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I'd lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock."

Then, everything changes. When she attends a charity concert in a pub - not a typical activity for Eleanor, but her office provided the tickets - she spots the love of her life onstage. Eleanor immediately falls head over heels for the lead singer, knows that they will end up married and living happily ever after, and sets out to improve herself so that she is ready to meet him properly. This involves some hilarious experiences, particularly with the waxing salon, but Eleanor suddenly has a purpose. Two other things happen at about the same time. She meets the office IT guy, Raymond (a pretty stereotypical IT guy, dressed in hoodie and scruffy beard), and they very slowly, gradually become friends, and she unwittingly ends up helping an older man who has a heart attack in the street.

Gradually, with growing hints throughout the novel, Eleanor's past slowly comes to light, including the significant traumas that caused her to be so self-contained and isolated. These events are heart-breaking, but the dark tone is offset beautifully by Eleanor's unintentionally hilarious descriptions of the world around her, as she awakens to it. She is proper, tight-laced, and completely out of touch with pop culture (her shocked description of Spongebob Squarepants is one of my favorite passages!). With Raymond's help, she slowly joins the real world. I SO want to share with you some of the funniest passages (and there are many!), but I think they are better discovered by the reader as the story moves along. Suffice to say that there are many, many laugh-out-loud moments in this unique novel. My book group universally loved Eleanor and the novel (a rarity for us) and gave it an average rating of 8, with several 9's and 10's in the group. It is a poignant, delightful, compelling book that I never wanted to end, and despite the trauma in Eleanor's past, it is ultimately an uplifting story of healing and renewal. Just describing it and paging through it makes me want to read it all over again.

325 pages, Penguin Books

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Listen to a sample of the audio, which sounds wonderful! Cathleen McCarron does a beautiful job of narrating Eleanor's story. It will give you a taste of Eleanor's unique voice.

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