Book Review: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: June 5, 2018
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.
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.
Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .
The only way to survive is to open your heart.
Eleanor Oliphant has almost no social skills or filter. She works in an office during the week and spends her weekends eating frozen pizza and drinking vodka to escape her loneliness and memories of her troubled childhood. She strikes up a friendship (maybe the first she’s ever had) with her company’s IT guy Raymond when they both come to the rescue of an elderly man who has fallen on the sidewalk.
This book would be horribly sad if not for Eleanor’s deadpan observations on the world going on around her. She reminded me a lot of Don Tillman from The Rosie Project. However, her perspective doesn’t stem from autism but from trauma and loneliness. One assumes that she doesn’t have much in the way of social skills because she never practices by interacting with other people. Her coworkers, except for Raymond, are simply awful to her because she’s different. It’s a vicious circle – she’s awkward so no one wants to be he friend, which makes her even more awkward.
Once she meets Raymond, things start to look up for her a little, even though she resists Raymond’s overtures of friendship at first. As the book goes on, we learn more and more about her childhood. I think the book would have been just fine without the mystery and twist, which I thought was contrived and familiar. Overall, I really liked this book because I love characters like Eleanor who see through all the bull and call it like it is, even when they don’t necessarily know that’s what they are doing. And I love dark, dry humor when it’s done right as it is in Eleanor. Recommended.
P.S. I looked into the status of the movie adaptation of Eleanor that Reese Witherspoon is making and all I could find is that it is “in development”. If I had to guess, I would say that it is on the back burner because of covid.
