Book Review: Eleanor and Park

[osprey_archer]

I finished Eleanor and Park, which I really liked right up until the ending, which I really, really hated. I can’t forgive Eleanor for the way she treated Park at the end. He helps her run away from her horrible abusive home to her aunt & uncle’s house in St. Paul, drives her all the way there - and once she arrives, she decides that she’s going to cut off all contact with Park, because she can’t bear the thought that he’ll ever love her less than he does now.

That's the stupidest fucking reason I've ever heard for breaking someone's heart. She can't bear the thought that he'll ever love her less, so she takes a course of action that will make him miserable and probably ensure that he hates her? Well, she won't have to see it, so I guess it doesn't count. The selfishness, the self-centeredness - it's breathtaking.

I found it especially unforgivable because, one, she makes this decision while she’s still in the car with Park - so she could have told him, but she doesn’t, just sits there and lets him rattle on about how they’ll send each other letters and she’ll call him tonight, won’t she? For fuck’s sake, Eleanor, tell him what you’re planning to do. Of course he’ll try to talk you out of it. People generally do try to talk you out of it when you’re planning to do something cruel to them.

And two, they don’t know whether Eleanor’s aunt & uncle will take her in, so for all Park knows, the reason she never writes is because they refused and now she’s a homeless teenage prostitute in St. Paul who can’t afford the price of a stamp.

Park is phenomenally generous to her for the entire book - open-heartedly generous, beating himself up because he can’t give more. The idea of any kind of quid pro quo never even occurs to him. And Eleanor takes it all, because she’s in a terrible life situation and she’s doing what she has to do to survive, and that's fair enough. They're both doing the best they can with what they've got.

But when Eleanor is finally in a position where she could reciprocate - she’s selfish. She's cruel. She doesn’t even convince herself (erroneously but perhaps understandably) that cutting off contact will be better for Park somehow; she doesn’t think about how this decision will affect him at all. She actually has the audacity to feel sorry for herself when he finally stops writing to her. Clearly he should just keep giving forever.

Of course she never says “I love you” to Park - always “I need you.” She lusts after him, but she doesn’t love him. And when she no longer needs him - the moment she no longer needs him, the very day that he drives her to St. Paul and there's nothing more she can get out of him - she tosses him aside.

...And because we have Eleanor's narration, we know there's more to her feelings than that. But Park doesn't have Eleanor's narration. Park has what she's actually said and what she's actually done, which is abandon him as soon as she has no further use for him. Imagine having the most important person in your life cut off all contact without a word of warning, and you look back on your time together and you realize they never said "I love you," that maybe they didn't love you, maybe they meant it absolutely literally when they said "I need you." Maybe they were just using you all along. Maybe you built your life on sand.

And no, sending a single postcard more than a year after the fact that is implied to say “I love you” doesn’t make that all better. Fuck you, Eleanor. You could have had it all and you threw it away and I hope Park doesn’t take you back.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow. I'm always staggered when I hear something like this; I always wonder what the hell the author was thinking.

[osprey_archer]

I think in this case, it's a failure to really think through how this would look from Park's end. The book is told with alternating narrators, so we the readers know that Eleanor loves Park in her own bizarre I-love-you-but-I-don't-know-how-to-treat-you-well way. (I think I should add some acknowledgment of this to the review. Let me go edit.)

But of course Park has no access to Eleanor's internal monologue. He has no way of knowing that she really feels that way. All he has is her actions, ending with the action of "ceasing to speak to him once there's nothing more she can get out of him." The most important person in his life has abruptly cut off contact with him, without a word, without apparently a backward glance - and when he looks back at their relationship he could easily construct a convincing story that it's because she never loved him in the first place. She wouldn't even say she loved him.

And even if he doesn't go that route (although I've seen people go that route with FAR less supporting evidence) - I still think he'd be a lot more devastated than the book lets on. Maybe because the book is almost over & the story needs to wrap up, it soft-pedals the effect this would have on Park. I think (to answer your comment below) that's why it doesn't bother people so much.

...I also have a HULK SMASH RAGE button about people who act like they're going to keep in touch and then totally fail to keep in touch, so the ending probably bothered me more than it will most people.

[missroserose]

I don't think it's unusual to be bothered by that idea at all. Ghosting hurts! Rejection hurts to begin with, and adding uncertainty on top of that just makes it worse. I'm still working on forgiving an at-one-time quite close friend who not-quite-ghosted me. (After I set a boundary with her about her behavior she said she needed a break for a while, and proceeded to disappear for months...and rather than tell me to my face she'd rather not be friends anymore, she recently unfriended me on Facebook. And to top it off, she never returned my favorite Tupperware container. Which is one of those petty little things that bothers me out of all proportion. She knew it was my favorite, too.) That shit hurts—it's hard to process feelings when so much remains unresolved.

[asakiyume]

Well, I totally get having an outsized rage when things hit your personal buttons. I suspect that ending would hit mine too: I haaaaaate people being left out in the cold like that. At least give me some sense of happiness awaiting Park, some way to resolve this!

It sounds like, within-story, there's no NEED to have that as the ending, too. Why throw in that gratuitous nastiness? To decide (for what reason?? Your own sense of wanting to make neat closure? Who wants to do that? I suppose I get thinking "This is perfect right now so I want it to end right now, so it never gets bad"--but that means people in your life exist only as props in your own story, not as beings with their own realities... and it's pretty sad to think that's how people feature in Eleanor's life.

[osprey_archer]

There's no need for it at all: it comes out of nowhere, a total punch in the gut. It doesn't make for a neat ending, either, so I don't think it's that. I think Rowell is trying to Say Something with it, maybe about the transitory nature of teenage love? (there are disparaging remarks about Romeo & Juliet earlier) or perhaps about female independence or...

But whatever it was, it just didn't come off for me. It came off much more as Eleanor seeing Park as a prop in her story, which killed every desire I had to see them get together ever again - and I was really rooting for them before this!

[asakiyume]

It's also freaking me out to look on Goodreads and see all these people--including ones I know--full of love for the story. Did they not care? That's chilling to me.

[rachelmanija]

Whaaaat? Well, that sure kills my desire to ever read the book.

[asakiyume]

Seriously.

[osprey_archer]

It was such a disappointment. I really loved it right up till the end, too, which just makes it worse: it's not just that Park is betrayed, but I felt betrayed, too.

[sovay]

- and once she arrives, she decides that she’s going to cut off all contact with Park, because she can’t bear the thought that he’ll ever love her less than he does now.

I was broken up with once like that, by someone who did not explain what they were doing until long after the fact. I would not classify it even now as breathtaking calculated cruelty—it's the kind of short-sighted, counterproductive decision people make out of fear—but I would have done much better if my person had said, "I'm really scared that we won't be able to make this relationship work long-distance; wouldn't it be more sensible if we just broke up now and saved ourselves the pain?" because then I would have been able to say, "No, it would not be more sensible, and it'll hurt if you break up with me no matter when, so we might as well try to make long-distance work." Instead, I was just suddenly broken up with, sans explanation or warning, because they thought it would hurt too much to wait to find out, and they felt better because they could control the timing of the pain, and I felt much worse. So the ending you describe strikes me as perfectly believable real-life behavior, just a lousy ending for a YA romance novel.

[ivy]

Yeah, I too have been on the receiving end of "I am going to cut you off completely and never tell you why" from someone I'd been very close to, and it is devastating. Once I realized that this was intentional on their part and not that they were dead in a ditch somewhere, I respected their wishes and stopped trying to contact them. But in both cases, I wandered around for a couple years afterwards wondering what happened. (I later found out. In one case, he'd started seeing an old girlfriend and she demanded that he cut off all his female friends that she thought were attractive, and he did it without a murmur. In the other, although my friend had turned me down when I'd asked him out, when I found a different boyfriend three years later, he got super jealous and shunned me because he was no longer the most important dude in my life. So in both cases, it was totally stupid, but, their choice!) But it's *rough* to go through, and certainly not something we should be holding up as a romantic ideal. My sympathy that you also had a similar experience!

[sovay]

My sympathy that you also had a similar experience!

Likewise!

[asakiyume]

So the ending you describe strikes me as perfectly believable real-life behavior, just a lousy ending for a YA romance novel.

Yeah: there are all kinds of real-life behaviors that make perfectly awful endings to novels. Especially if you're supposed to be liking the characters, to see one of them pull that move out of a hat at the end, and knowing what it will mean... what a way to poison what seemed destined to end positively.

Maybe that's what the women sartorias overheard meant by ending "bravely"; maybe they meant that the author took an unexpected turn. But it seems like a turn that spoils everything readers have been hoping for, so--why? If you want to give readers a taste of that real-life behavior, has the rest of the story supported that? Because if not, seems like sudden flavor-and-texture change and not-good.

It's not like she had to end with them living happily ever after. It could have just ended without particular intentions ...

[osprey_archer]

I mean, it's believable. Not only is it a thing that people do, but it's believable for Eleanor to do it. I didn't expect it of her, but when she did it, it didn't feel like a betrayal of her established character. It developed her character in an direction that was completely of a piece with her already existing flaws - that exacerbated those flaws to the point where I could no longer root for the relationship.

Until then I really wanted them to find a way to work it out and afterward I just felt, no, there's no coming back from that, Park deserves better and Eleanor deserves... to grow up, I guess. To grow up enough to really understand what was wrong with what she did, and hopefully to treat her future paramours better.

[sartorias]

Oh yeah. I once sat there where a bunch of women were talking about what a wonderful book it was, how daring it was for its brave ending. One of the speakers was quite smug and self-righteous about how "women get to have this ending".

I thought, what's daring about being a total asshole? I was pissed for HOURS. And I've never reviewed it because I don't want them dog piling on me.

[missroserose]

I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here (as a friend of mine likes to say, the devil already has plenty of advocates), but I wonder if what that person saw in the story wasn't a woman being an asshole and rejecting a friendship, but a woman accepting masculine help and then refusing to consider herself romantically indebted for it. There's a lot of (quite understandable) backlash right now against the dishearteningly-engrained social idea that women owe sex/love/affection in exchange for masculine kindness, and if this issue was a particular button for that person I could see how this might read that way to them. And yeah, actively rejecting someone's friendship is a way of expressing agency, I guess...but not one I'd call brave. Quite the opposite, really.

I might also be completely off base here—I haven't read the story, and I can't say I'm likely to, now.

[sartorias]

That is an excellent point. The discussion was long enough ago that I don't remember the particulars, so I don't recollect if someone tried to discuss it from that aspect. I'd recently read the book, and had largely the same raw response that Osprey Archer had, to Park being totally and utterly betrayed. Without a word. That kind of betrayal (I thought) transcends gender dynamics.

I think I would have bought it if she'd even turned and said, "Sadly, I'm just not into you, so we better make this parting quick, and I hope you recover fast. You are a great human being, but not for me," or some such, and I would have been okay with that.

But that wasn't the story the author wanted to tell.

[missroserose]

Yeah, I agree that from the descriptions it seems confounding and hurtful rather than empowering. I really don't get that, but then, I guess the story wasn't written for any of us, heh.

[osprey_archer]

But if she'd said that, she would have been lying. There are pages and pages and pages of description of how completely gorgeous Eleanor finds Park, how smart and funny and kind, and how much she wants to touch him. If she's not into him then no one has ever been into anyone ever.

And it would be a betrayal, just the same. Telling Park that she'd been straight-up pretending to be into him for months wouldn't be better than dropping out of contact with him and maybe letting him come to that conclusion on his own.

[sartorias]

I've forgotten many of the details, mainly remembering my disgust and rage and betrayal. Now that you mention it, yeah, it's coming back to me.

[osprey_archer]

I suppose that could be a valuable message - but it makes no sense in the context of Eleanor and Park. Eleanor is just as into Park as he is into her (lots of descriptions of how beautiful she finds him, etc.), and they've been dating for months when the Minnesota trip happens. It's not at all the case that he gives her a ride to Minneapolis and then Nice-Guyishly expects her to pony up with the romance in return. Given their relationship, his expectation that she'll want to keep in touch - or that she would at least say if she didn't! - is 100% reasonable.

[evelyn_b]

That's the stupidest fucking reason I've ever heard for breaking someone's heart.

I gasped out loud when I read it! Poor Park! Are we supposed to have a terrible sinking feeling at the end as we realize the depths of Eleanor's damage? Admittedly teenagers get bizarre and terrible ideas about love even without an abusive home life to complicate things, but. . . :(

I'm sorry the ending was such a sharp swerve into unhappiness. I hope Eleanor makes some new friends who aren't quite as open-hearted and generous all the time, and Park gets to hang out with people who like him without needing him quite so much.

[osprey_archer]

I don't know! MAYBE. Maybe we're supposed to read this ending and think, 'God, the apple didn't fall very far from the tree; Eleanor's just as selfish as her biodad and her mom." (Her stepfather, I grant you, is still worse.) "Is it nature? Is it nurture? Is it too late for her to learn better?"

[missroserose]

Wait, what? Seriously? That's it?

...I mean, I get that abusive situations leave us traumatized and often unable to cope with strong feelings. And I know we don't always make the best decisions when we're in the midst of a highly emotional situation. But WTFingF.

Seriously, even my lawyer's-daughter argue-both-sides brain is having trouble coming up with an explanation that makes sense. Other than maybe, if I turn my head and squint, it's a version of the unfortunately-common-among-abused-people "I don't feel like I deserve this love so I can't accept it". But it doesn't sound at all like how the narrative plays it. I'm almost tempted to read the book now just so I can denounce it properly.

[osprey_archer]

Eleanor does have moments of "I don't feel like I deserve this love so I can't accept it," so Rowell could have played the ending that way if she wanted - but she doesn't. Eleanor just decides not to contact him, and sticks to that decision long after that original highly emotional situation as passed, so in the long run that excuse doesn't fly either. She has a chance to change her mind every single time a letter from Park arrives, and she doesn't.