SPOILERS ABOUND (for a completely different book, sorry everyone!!!)

I hated that book too. I actually hate-read it to the end and ... imo it never redeems itself. Eleanor Oliphant makes no sense as a character. One of the pleasures of reading a book is getting inside a character's head, but I felt completely outside of her mind, watching her make weird, senseless decisions, for seemingly no reason, with no insight from Eleanor herself or any narrator or anything. The whole point of the story, I guess is that she murders her father... and then is wracked with guilt. Just, what?? And people are saying she's flawed but believable? No one does what she did. Maybe like one person somewhere did something like it once.

The part that really mystified me somehow was when she housesat for her neighbor and spilled some coffee on the rug, so she had the whole rug steam cleaned and she cleaned up the house on top of that. And then her neighbor came back and was super offended and stopped talking to her and Eleanor's like, "Whaaaaa....? I don't uNdErStAnD..." I guess if you like armchair psychology, you could sit there and come up with literally any reason she would do that, but I think that's super lazy on the author's part - come up with reasons your characters do weird shit, and then commit. Don't just have them do weird shit and leave your readers to make up reasons for it, justify it in their mind, and then be condescending and rude to people like you who post online about how they didn't get it, saying "well she has real issues - she's not perfect with one flaw like the protagonists in all the YA books I read, she is super flawed all the way through, this is LITERATURE."

Anyway, I'm with you - on top of all of the unbelievable actions/flaws of Eleanor Oliphant, it was ultimately boring somehow?? I think it's a lack of psychological insight and just a narrative full of drudgery. Compare with Ottessa Moshfegh whose characters are incredibly flawed, and maybe unbelievably weird, but somehow believable anyway, and interesting the whole time.