Lucy Ellmann

You may find yourself at times with the impulse to cheer, as you read Mimi by Lucy Ellmann. Give in to your desire. It is your better nature rooting for the irrepressible Mimi; for her erstwhile lover, Harrison; for Harrison’s gender-switching cat, Bubbles; and most importantly for Bee, Harrison’s artistic older sister who finds personal reclamation through her Coziness Sculptures and is generous enough to invite others to share her joy. If you enjoy a good rant, a loveable harangue, a show more hectoring friendship, and lists, lists, lists, then you may also enjoy this, sometimes dark, comedy. It is ‘sometimes dark’ because truly awful things happen to many of the minor characters and some of the major ones too. And, from a certain point of view, the underlying evil that is visited upon each of these unfortunates is the same: men. It’s enough to rouse you to a good rant, a loveable harangue, or a bit of hectoring. And there’s some nice talk of Bach and Beethoven too!

The plot is thin. A wealthy New York plastic surgeon slips on the ice, finds a stray kitten, becomes enamoured of a brash opinionated woman who opens his eyes to real love and the downtrodden plight of women everywhere, not least his older sister, and when the chips are down, he throws in his lot with women and becomes a feminist revolutionary (sort of). The characters, with the exception of the fascinating Bee, are equally thin and unbelievable. A piano-playing plastic surgeon, a sex theorizing speech coach, a social harpy named Gertrude (imagine!), brutalistic bullying husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and homicidal maniacs. Honestly, if you just added a bit of music, it might as well be opera. Which, strangely enough, it sort of is.

There is also something serious at the heart of this novel. But the ecstatic punning, verbal dizziness, and sometimes frenetic action might mistakenly lead a reader to assume that the vision Harrison sets forth at the climax of the novel is nothing more than a satirical manifesto, a bit of a lark, and too silly for words. That would be unfortunate. Unfortunate if Lucy Ellmann’s verve and élan worked against her polemic. Though I suppose it is the risk all writers take when they cozy up to comedy in pursuit of truth.

Gently recommended for ranting good humour and a recipe or two. show less

This short novel is a work of genius. Told from a single perspective, the mordant wit is searing and profound while remaining consistently engaging and affecting. It perpetually surprises. Everything from a droll conversation to a grocery list sparkles with the author's intelligent insights.

Human nature and anxious preoccupations are explored in the daily life of our middle-aged, opinionated narrator.

Where has this author been hiding all these years? Every sentence comments, entices and show more advances the subtle narrative links. It is simply a portrait of modern life, seen through a distorted lens, where reality blends with irreverent fantasies. Unexpected observations are strung together with wry, dry humor reminiscent of Alasdair Gray. It even partakes of the flavors of European travel literature, offering a unique perspective on the absurdity of modern conveniences, interactions and relationships.

The book might be seen as hateful or daring by some, but in my opinion, it is simply honest.
I am compelled to read the rest of Lucy Ellmann's books now. show less

This morning I finished this 1000 page book. I'm so grateful to the Club Read group read that prompted me to read this. I've read many long books, but most are classics, and it was interesting to read a very long modern book with current events at it's heart.

The narrator is a middle-aged woman living in the middle of Ohio. She has 4 kids (ages 2-15) and bakes pies for a living. She is on her second marriage and deeply in love with her husband, Leo. She has had cancer and her mother died show more from cancer - this "broke her". She repeatedly thinks "the fact that when Mommy died it broke me, I'm broken". She has a typically troubled mother/daughter relationship with her teenage daughter, Stacey.

All of the things you learn about her life come from her interior monologue which runs beneath her daily activity. Only certain real life events make it into this monologue. Instead most of it is stretches of childhood memory, thinking about movies or other cultural references, and chains of related words. She also thinks about current events - mainly pollution, gun violence, and politics (not a Trump fan!). I found it easy to identify with her thoughts and many made me laugh. We had similar upbringings in the midwest - similar foods, movies, and cultural experiences to reminisce about.

Interposed with her rambling thoughts, there is the story of an American mountain lioness. I was struck by the contrast between the human mother and the lioness mother. The first is constantly worrying with mental chatter but is physically comfortable and the other is experiencing the dangers of nature but has a relatively calm interior life. However, as the book goes on these two experiences converge as the lioness has harmful human interaction and the woman's physical life is endangered.

There were several things that bothered me about this book. I never could figure out the timeline and there were times that I was very annoyed by the narrator's mental chatter. However, I loved the inventiveness of the format and I really thought the intersection of the lioness and the mother narrator was unique and moving.

Despite the length and "newness" of this book, I didn't think it was all that challenging to read or understand. And I didn't think it needed to be shorter - I thought the length was right for the topic and form. Overall, I would recommend it. I love that a book so long and different found a publisher! show less

Ducks.... where do I start. I feel like I've just completed a marathon, and true to the analogy am feeling some sort of giddy elation at having crossed the finish line. Reading doesn't feel like enough of a word to describe this novel - perhaps 'reading experience' captures it better.

This isn't a relaxing book to read. Oddly, it's not the lack of full stops that creates any issue - it's surprising how quickly you get into the reading groove and forget about that, and also stop seeing the show more plethora of 'the fact that' phrases on every page. What demands your attention is rather the sheer volume of information constantly thrown at you - lists of words, anxieties on US societal issues, family worries - and the interchangeability of these topics, often changing continually between commas. There is also no obvious timeline, and from one comma to the next it can skip hours or days (we're never quite sure).

The narration is the interior monologue of a mother of four who is plagued by worries, anxieties and loss. It's different to stream of consciousness in that it perhaps more accurately conveys the erratic nature of our thought process. We don't think in nice concise sentences - our mind flits all over the place, and this is what Ellmann tries to convey in the narrative voice.

This novel is also something of a political stance, or perhaps rather an anti-politics stance. Our Ohio mother rails against many aspects of modern day American society - Trump, deliberate acts of environmental sabotage (dumping of chemicals into rivers and drinking water, nuclear material knowingly left to leak, etc), gun crime and the NRA. So much of the information imparted was horrendous (yet stood up to Google fact checking). In that sense it is perhaps the most brutally honest American novel I've read, although I'm still chewing that over in my mind and trying to figure out if it's honesty or over-sensationalism.

Interwoven in the story is the tale of a mountain lioness and her quest to find her missing cubs, which was not as random as it sounds. It weaves very nicely into the mother's own interior monologue, and at a reading level offers much appreciated respite as it breaks up the narrative.

Back to my marathon analogy, this is a long book that requires close reading, and somewhere in the middle i hit 'the wall' and found it difficult to keep picking up my feet (or rather picking up the book). However, I'm glad I prevailed, and even returned to really enjoying the book in the last few hundred pages. It's a tour de force, a book of admirable achievement when you start to appreciate that it's not just a load of random phrases but actually an immense piece of work that's meticulously sewn together.

4 stars - a vast book in all senses, but one that deserved a few weeks of my time. show less