Completely Fine

May 9, 2022

I closed the cover of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, a first novel by Scottish author Gail Honeyman. The book won a prestigious literary prize, the Costa First Novel Award in 2017, which is given to English, Scottish, and Irish authors. I’ve now read it twice.

Completely Fine is a story of confronting tragedy and of courage. God knows we are getting many such stories today in the nightmare world of Ukraine. But Honeyman’s story of Eleanor is personal, private, and consuming.

This isn’t the kind of book I would be inclined to read, but our daughter read it a while back and said it got good reviews. I borrowed it at the public library, browsed through it, then finished it in a few days.

Until two Virginia friends talked me into getting into a local book club two years ago, I almost never read fiction. The club selections include a lot of works of fiction, many of them ponderous agonizing about personal conflict, bad relationships, alienation, loneliness. It’s the literature of the modern world. I plow through it, waiting for the gems.

I’ve made the time. When you quit working you’re signing up, figuratively, for reworking your schedule—that is, for transforming your life. Some folks relocate, others stay put. In either case it’s the “R” word, retirement. We all aspire to get the formula right. Some do it gracefully, others go off the rails with money problems, health problems, personal loss, the way life works. You have close calls, you do what you can to right the ship and keep sailing. You can do those things, or you can stare at TV or the internet for hours every day.

The goal, everyone’s goal, is getting joy out of this chapter of life by seeking perspective, balance, a sense of the world. You could call it old-folks maturity, but really it’s the mission of any thinking person. Balance means preserving and sharpening the life of the mind by battling the impulse to lapse into routine. Retired folks can find themselves in a fix. Unless you “unretire” and go back to work, your schedule now is your own and you’re looking at seven days off every week. “Every day is Saturday,” a smart guy I know used to say.

You can seek joy by taking up hobbies, travel, staying fit, volunteering, dabbling in new things, like this blog. But they’re not obligations or commitments. The free time is still there, inviting you to reflect, to look out at the sunrise and the sunset, to ponder what you’ve accomplished and what your life means, what you believe, what lies ahead.

Balance and perspective means learning, opening yourself to awareness and understanding of new, even disturbing sides of human nature.

That’s how I found Eleanor Oliphant. It’s fiction, but somehow just barely. Like all good fiction, whether by Dostoevsky, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Scott Fitzgerald, Honeyman’s story says something about life that resonates. She may not end up with those names in some pantheon of great writers. But then, she might.

When Honeyman’s story begins, set in the author’s hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, Eleanor, the heroine—I think that’s the right word—is dutiful and meticulous in going about her life, which amounts to a clerical job in an office. She goes to work, says as little as possible to her colleagues, shops for her groceries, returns to her humble apartment. She stays home over weekends, speaking to no one but store clerks from Friday evening until Monday morning.

Her story begins to unfold. She reports that she drinks a couple of liters of vodka every weekend, then sleeps it off. She speaks on the phone with someone whom she calls “Mummy,” disturbing conversations with a voice that is difficult to identify as a parent.

The world barges in on her constricted life. Her office computer stops working, she calls IT—the IT guy, Raymond, shows up to fix it. She reports with irritation his appearance—slovenly dress, chin stubble, bad haircut. When she leaves work she is annoyed Raymond is leaving at the same time. Trying to be polite, she walks with him toward the bus stop. Suddenly an elderly man collapses on the sidewalk. Raymond rushes to help. He hands Eleanor his cellphone and orders her to call emergency services, but she is paralyzed and useless. Raymond grabs the phone from her and calls. EMTs take the man to the hospital.

A social services worker visits Eleanor’s apartment for a stilted, difficult interview. We begin to develop a fuller but still incomplete picture. Raymond persuades her to visit the old man at the hospital. At his bedside, the man’s children thank Eleanor and Raymond for helping their father.

That’s my teaser.

The writer draws us into the near-opaque mystery of Eleanor’s life. It is a mystery of profound personal tragedy that becomes, depending how the reader may score such things, one of redemption through self-knowledge, self-respect, self-love. She writes delicately and obliquely of fearless acceptance of life’s experiences, of honesty and courage, helped along by recognition and understanding of the value of the human person.

Honeyman leaves us an eloquent but discreet message of the enduring promise of acceptance and kindness, humble and unpretentious as it may be. She doesn’t preach. She offers no happy ending, but unwritten lessons about pain, honesty, and recovery, lessons that call to us, and endure.