Eleanor Oliphant
The title character of this novels a first name with the title character of a famous song by the Beatles about all the lonely people in the world that asks where they come from and wonders where they belong. Eleanor Oliphant is one of those lonely people she comes from Glasgow but does not seem to belong anywhere. A social misfit who not only acts the part, but looks it as a result of more than a decade of an absence of any concern about her physical appearance. The scars on her face don’t help, of course. She lives alone, has a go-nowhere job, only makes it through the weekends thanks to massive consumption of alcohol and has a very strange relationship with her mother. On the other hand, she’s just found she considers husband-material.
Johnnie Lomond
Johnnie Lomond is that husband-material. He is a singer in a local rock band Eleanor’s love for him changes everything. She undergoes a comprehensive agenda of physical transformation all for the love of Johnnie. Although it should be mentioned that she has never actually met him. That will soon change courtesy of an upcoming gig at a local club. As is often the case, reality does not go according to fantasy and Eleanor is slapped hard upside with the head with the revelation that objects of affection known only from a distance should probably stay that way.
Raymond Gibbons
Raymond and Eleanor meet in what has probably become cute-meet story of thousands of couples over the year: her computer becomes infected with a virus and Raymond arrives to cure it. The truth, however, is that it is not computer that brings them closer together, but random acts of human kindness involving actual interaction. They both stop to take the time to offer assistance to an older man who has collapsed in the middle of the road. Alas, this is not a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie, but a novel about loneliness and though Eleanor finally makes the essential move of finding a friend, romance is not on the horizon.
Maria Temple
Maria Temple is the therapist whom Eleanor sees to deal with a traumatic episode from her past which infects her present and is the cause of her anti-social existence and non-compliant approach to the dictates of social interaction. The stimulating event was a fire which claimed the life of her younger sister, Marianne. Everything from the point of tragedy has been the engine driving Eleanor into becoming one of the lonely people.
Mummy
Like clockwork, Eleanor has an appointment every Wednesday night that she never misses: her weekly fifteen minute conversation with her mother. These conversations are inevitable in their predictability. Any actual attempt by Eleanor to alter the conditions of her existence by introducing normal social intercourse is met with a sarcastic reminder that she is too stupid to be of interest to anybody else and too screwed-up to be worthy of loving. But there is much more to this psychologically sadomasochistic mother-daughter relationship than meets the eye.
