Man or Mango?

Eloise is on a fervent retreat from mankind--greedy, cruel, and worthless species that it is. She would, however, very much like a man. "On a scale of human suffering," Lucy Ellmann asserts, her heroine's "celibacy was of little account. But in an ideal world it would be recognized as the tragedy it was. This, in a woman who from the age of five suspected she wanted more sex than she would ever get." Alas, Eloise's temporary crushes on her mover, a gardener (not even her own), and the neighbor's architect have resulted only in disappointment and a criminal waste of lipstick. Her real obsession remains George, an American she had an affair with on a New England holiday six years earlier. But after she returned to England, the relationship eventually fizzled and she is now condemned to a life of misanthropy and felines. She is also on a furious letter-writing and list-making streak. In one lengthy roster she assesses social (i.e., "damaging") encounters according to the recovery time they require. In another, she explains "HOW EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE WORLD IS MEN'S FAULT," including whistling ("Men are forever announcing their presence with this territorial tunelessness") and male nipples ("Borrowed jewelry for a chest that is too flat. They even stuck nipples on their medieval armour! Ridiculous. Insane.").

Unbeknownst to Eloise, her long-lost lover is actually in England, on a creative-writing sinecure that is only making his own writing--an ill-fated script and an ice-hockey-fixated epic--worse, not to mention turning him Anglophobic. As far as George is concerned, the British are video-crazed, sex-avoiding, and deeply narcissistic. For one thing, "most of Benjamin Britten's (incredible) reputation here's due to his name being BRITTEN." When these star-crossed lovers finally meet again in Connemara--along with a giant-vegetable-growing burglar and letter bomber; a man whose wife drowned while she was rescuing their pet ("It wasn't that their dog wasn't worth saving," he thinks, "a gentle fellow who never barked"); and various other misfits including three old ladies on a shoplifting spree--the results are spectacular. (Think Deep Impact, but on a smaller scale.) As Ellmann's third novel careens from the deadly serious (the Holocaust) to the deeply absurd (mangoes are better than men because they don't "lord it over everybody at committee meetings"), it may well exasperate some readers. Others, however, will be charmed by this fruitful, extreme concoction. --Kerry Fried


Genre: Literary Fiction