Reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen is an exercise in waiting. A slow story of social dysfunction in a quiet New England locality, it is not unlike Ethan Frome. But, beyond the general morbidity and volume of snow, Eileen starts to stand apart from comparisons to Edith Wharton, owing to its remarkable merits, as well as to its less remarkable flaws. It’s been shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize—the winner of which is announced next week—but the judges don’t have an easy job with this novel. Having “unremarkable flaws” is perhaps how the eponymous narrator, looking back to 1964, would best describe her twenties. She lives an unenviable life as a secretary in a boy’s prison, living at home with her drunkard father. She is lonely, and loathes almost everybody. Presentday Eileen reminds us—almost on a schedule, every few pages—that she will at some point make a dramatic, leave-it-all-behind escape. But, page after page it doesn’t happen, and the reader waits.

Of course, the wait is actually the story. Confusingly, one critic given prime dustjacket space tells us that Moshfegh’s novel is: “A taut psychological thriller”. An endorsement likely to shift copies at the airport, perhaps, but a one-sided description of most of Moshfegh’s novel. Eileen’s narrative is as messy as her house. It has a stop-start, digressional nature that does actually read like the half-remembered account of an aged mind. This works very well for characterisation and pacing. Eileen brings us repeatedly back to people and happenings, layering and layering. No, “taut” doesn’t work here. It is a very flexible narrative.

As for “psychological”, that belies the novel’s intense awareness of the body. The way Moshfegh confronts us with what bodies do is disgusting, candid, and wonderful. Close-ups of masticating mouths and constant awareness of sweat make for dark comedy; thoughts on the shame attached to menstruation and strong hints at eating disorders make for darker refl ections. These bodies move in a world made readable less by minds than by objects. Candy wrappers, alcohol bottles, dead animals and sheets of paper pass as deftly through her prose as through the hands of her characters. I have rarely read a more physical story than Eileen.

But it is that larger description, ‘psychological thriller’, which underscores the book’s big weakness. If it weren’t for the last 40-odd pages, nobody would go near the word “thriller” when writing about this book. Yes, the turnaround line, the big reveal, is delivered with masterful, thrilling timing. But once it is done, and things suddenly begin to move in a distinctly more “thrillery” way, the last pages are disappointing. Eileen’s distinctive voice seems to get spliced with a boring, readymade thriller tone. Airport readers might have been disappointed, but the book would have worked really well without the twist and escape. It’s not that Eileen shouldn’t have borrowed from genre: it’s that it did it badly. It seems right to remember Eileen for what it mostly is: a slow, raw account of the screwed up. When you think of it like that, this book deserves prizes. Unfortunately for Moshfegh, people put a lot on endings, and the Man Booker panel might not be so forgiving.

No one missed Bob Dylan winning this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature last week. In 2015, a Belarusian author almost unknown in the Anglophone world named Svetlana Alexievich won the same prize. What made Alexievich’s victory unusual was that, like Dylan, she wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for her poems, novels, or short stories. She doesn’t have any of these. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her non-fiction.

This year the judges again branched out from the common understanding of literature. When we think of literature, we tend to think of novels, poems, or short stories—very occasionally a travelogue, though that only secondarily and with some doubt as to whether it ought to be included. Yet when we look at the Oxford English Dictionary, literature is defined as “Written works, especially considered to be of superior or lasting artistic merit”. No talk there of the necessity of the events being made, the characters false and the actions imagined. Indeed, much of what we may colloquially call literature doesn’t fall under this definition at all—who after all considers the turgid prose of Dan Brown or the works of the poetaster William McGonagall, as being “of superior or lasting artistic merit”.

Though it seems alien to us in England and 2016, for Alfred Nobel, viewing works of non- fiction as works of literature seemed natural. Indeed, given his general practical disposition and outlook, it appears very likely that when Alfred Nobel set out a prize for literature in his will, he meant it mainly to benefit authors of non-fiction. And for a few brief years after Nobel died, his wish was on the whole followed, and a number of authors mainly noted for their non-fiction won the Nobel Prize for literature, including the classicist Theodor Mommsen and the philosopher Henri Bergson. But it didn’t take long for non-fiction laureates to become sparser and sparser.

Which brings us back to Alexievich. She is the first laureate since 1953, when Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel, to have won the prize for non-fiction work. That is not to say other laureates haven’t written non-fiction since then. Pablo Neruda would write political pamphlets, Doris Lessig wrote her memoirs, and number of laureates have written copiously on literary criticism, but none of these were why they won the prize. They won it for their fiction.

Some may say the dearth of non-fiction writers amongst Nobel laureates isn’t a problem. Definitions change, and in the modern age, literature has come to mean fiction. But the lack of acknowledgement of non-fiction as literature is part of wider problem. It is extends to what C.P. Snow, in 1953, called the two cultures. Then, it was simply a division between literary intellectuals and scientific intellectuals, but today, the world has gotten much more fragmented. The literary intellectuals now come to consider literature as their own field of fiction, and whatever lies beyond it to be some strange writing, but certainly not literature. Which is a pity because for all the benefit of novels and poems, there is still much which can only be learnt from non-fiction, and many great stories which are true.

A common riposte to this argument would no doubt be that fiction authors tend to be better stylists. Even if this is so, it does not take away from the fact that there have been a number of authors who write mainly or exclusively non-fiction who, as stylists, are equal to a Nobel novelist. In the English language alone, since 1953, there has been the historian E.P. Thompson, the biologist Richard Dawkins, the essayist Christopher Hitchens, and the travel writer Rebecca West. All of these are writers of great skill and ability, who are at least of deserving of a Nobel as Haldor Laxness or Par Lagerkvist.

In the midst of the debate over Dylan’s worthiness, non-fiction remains neglected in the prize’s history. I hope that, in future, the judges don’t revert to their old practices, but consider worthy writers such as Richard Dawkins and David McCullough, who write about real events, and not just their imaginations.

I first read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in the Michaelmas I came to Oxford. Its reputation as the definitive summary of the experience of going to university at Oxford had drawn me to it: a literary testament from an institution famed for the writers it had produced. Brideshead carried an aura of being a summation of what it means to be an Oxonian, even if only its first third is set in Oxford. It’s surprising how its depiction of Oxford still resonates, despite being firmly set in the 1920s. The great speech given to the protagonist, Charles Ryder, by his older cousin Jasper, who’s already at Oxford, carries a good bit of truth, even after all this time:

“You’re reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The very worst is English literature and the next worse is Modern Greats. You want either a first or a fourth. […] Time spent on a good second is time thrown away. You should go to the best lectures […] irrespective of whether they are in your school or not…Clothes. Dress as you do in a country house. Never wear a tweed coat and flannel trousers—always a suit. […] Clubs. Join the Carlton and the Grid at the beginning of your second year. If you want to run for the Union—and it’s not a bad thing to do—make your reputation outside first, at the Canning or the Chatham […]. Don’t treat dons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at home… You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first. … Beware of the Anglo-Catholics—they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups”.

Comparing now and then, what immediately becomes clear is how little store was set by academic work. Lectures are to be gone to for the general improvement of the mind, rather than whether they aid with a tutorial essay (and thankfully, the tradition of attending open lectures continues). There’s an idea that Oxford is fundamentally a social university, a space to meet other people—hence Jasper’s exacting recommendation to ‘[d]ress as you do in a country house’. Sartorial standards may have dropped in the intervening decades amongst the majority. Although a minority can still be reliably found in a suit and tie most days. Some of the clubs mentioned, like the Canning and Chatham, are no more, but the Union is going stronger than perhaps ever before and features amongst the collective consciousness of the university.

There’s also the snobbery. The casual dismissal of Modern Greats (now known as PPE) betrays a mindset of subject rivalry which has mellowed but is still present and encouraged to some extent; on the other hand, the contention that ‘You want either a first or a fourth’ in an era of Gentleman’s and Ladies’ thirds has long since passed since the expansion of universities in the post-war era. The homophobic attitude towards Anglo-Catholics reveals what were still underlying tensions toward the disputations of the Victorian Oxford Movement.

Some would argue that snobbery has far from disappeared from Oxford. While students come from increasingly varied backgrounds, with 59 percent of this year’s freshers having been state educated, undergraduates sharing the background of the Ryders are very much part of the fabric of university life, just as the Gridiron Club still exists in its rooms above Pizza Express in Golden Cross. Oxford has changed substantially in many respects since Waugh went here, yet one need only scratch beneath the surface to see an institution where it is possible to step back in time, even for those who have not been privately educated. Brideshead Revisited still tells us where to look when we want to peel back the layers of a university nearly a millennium old.