Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman Review

All you need is… Tesco pizza. Tesco pizza is all you need…?

But Tesco pizza is all Eleanor Oliphant has.

30 years old, working as a finance clerk at a small firm, Eleanor has no friends, no partner, and her one family member? Well… Mummy is something else. But Eleanor’s completely fine. It’s fine to be alone all the time. It’s fine to drink bottles of vodka on the weekend to forget what happened to her when she was a kid (shame then that an Oliphant never forgets…). Repressing your memories through excessive self-medication never went wrong for anyone. Everything’s fine - better in fact, especially since she’s seen the love of her life: a local wannabe rockstar. They haven’t met yet, but that’s just a formality…

There were parts of Gail Honeyman’s debut (and, to date, only) novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine that I liked and parts I didn’t - it was a decent book.

Eleanor herself is the best part. This is one of those novels that fall into the unlikely contemporary subgenre of “autistic lead characters” that have been bizarrely popular ever since The Curious Incident… took off over 20 years ago (Convenience Store Woman, The Rosie Project, et al.). Honeyman never explicitly says anything to the effect that Eleanor is on the spectrum but it’s fairly clear that she is. Socially awkward, doesn’t quite understand socialising or social cues, loves puzzles. Her blunt assessment of people is the comedy aspect of the book, and it works well enough.

But she’s also just very likeable. A vulnerable, intelligent and kind person who’s had a horrendous life - who doesn’t find themselves rooting for the underdog with no self esteem because they’ve taken L after L? The story’s trajectory is quite predictable - I knew immediately where things were going with Raymond and Mummy - but what kept me reading was waiting to see Eleanor rise to meet those moments, as she inevitably does. Seeing someone who clearly wants things but doesn’t know how to achieve them, eventually achieve them in their own way, is satisfying.

It’s amusing to see Eleanor’s strange quest to meet the local rockstar wannabe play out, and reading about her very regimented, empty life is compelling too. The scenes when her utter cunt of a mother appeared were unexpectedly terrifying, and the part that begins “Bad Days” was enthralling, if bleak.

The parts involving Sammy, the old man she and Raymond save, were quite bland, and sort of Hallmark-y - very mundane, like filler from a soap opera. The scenes of Eleanor tidying herself up - getting a bikini wax, doing her nails, getting her hair cut - were similarly dull, and the story went on far longer than it needed to. We get the arc Eleanor’s on long before she completes it - ditto the “twist” involving Mummy, because the novel would be too flat if there wasn’t one - so I was counting the pages a bit towards the end.

Some aspects of the story are quite obviously manipulative in their sentimentality - Glen the cat, and what happened to Eleanor as a kid - though effective. And the therapist passages were gratuitous - I didn’t need to read all of those banal conversations filled with dreary psychobabble.

The story is fairly ordinary but the title character is winning and I enjoyed seeing her overcome her challenges. And, while nearly 400 pages seems excessive, Honeyman’s prose is very accessible and the pages move swiftly as a result, to make it seem like a shorter book than it is.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is… completely fine.