Two temptations when writing about a book like this: the first is to imitate its “crazee” infectious style, adopt its motifs, and in this case start every phrase with “the fact that,” and the second is to translate it into something more conventional, excavate its characters and plot, stripping away all disorientation, themes, and exaggerated logorrhea.
Generally, I loved this for the first few hundred pages, thinking of it like a modern Midwestern Molly Bloom soliloquy (complete with a husband named Leo), a quasi American Bernhardian Knausgaardian exagmination of the quotidian, structurally similar to Mathias Enard’s Zone (discontinuous single sentence — phrase pile-up, really — separated by brief installments of comparatively conventional story), thriving thanks to competing/conflicting forces that extrude (girth and great sentence length) and contract (constant bursts of word-association shorthand).
On the most American of page numbers (76), the title’s famous precedent from Lolita appears: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” In this, the “motif” is introduced with a story about an enormous penguin and the response to it (“cool”) — later on “penguin, ‘cool'” appears, and that’s one of the ways a reader starts to have fun with this, learning how to read this, how to climb the sheer rock face of phrases without full stops or space breaks. But there are plenty of handholds and little regularly appearing ledges that help you “send” this one — it’s not at all difficult reading, it’s totally accessible, mostly because the tone/style, the pitch of the language, is so even-keeled, without pretentious poetic flourish or much variation: “equability‘s my A1 priority” on pg 79).
And of course there’s “the fact that,” which serves as a sort of space break, a grammar, and is thematically interesting in a work of fiction which is essentially, like Enard’s Zone and Compass, a Major Reference Work, a Wiki-marbled novel (for me, it’s “marbled,” not “larded”) that feels like a compendium of readily available facts copied, pasted, and if not necessary charged then at least propelled with some purpose.
But by 560 for some reason, soon after learning the meaning of the title (it feels like a spoiler to discuss it because learning what it refers to was critical propulsion for me, really the only plot-ish engine other than the story about the lion — also seemed like its revelation came too early on page 504 — around 475 I started thinking that it wouldn’t be revealed until the end as a carrot for the reader to strive for), my reading accelerated somewhat through the primary “the fact that” steam of consciousness POV, looking forward to the short, interstitial, comparatively conventional segments from the perspective of a lioness.
Sometimes thought it was written by a computer programmed to emit phrases that somehow corresponded to an endless elaboration of Pi. Loved it, rooted for it, recommended it, but then it started to seem inexhaustible — and the system of associations too often returned to Hollywood movies/actors (Harrison Ford, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau), environmental devastation and assorted horrors at the hands of corporations and men, as well as really recent Trump-related news that was interesting at first, relevant, hefty, charged, but that dulled for me with repetition and exposure, as though the pathos and contemporary politics felt tacked on, pasted in, enough already, thereby effectively mirroring the emotional/psychological overload pretty much everyone feels three years into the “SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE RACIST SEXIST NAZI POTUS” era (loved the bit about Stace’s class photo T-shirt). In short, without a tinge of sexism from this male reviewer, its game got played out for me a little beyond the midway point, I experienced negative reality overload, and yet there were still some 400 pages to go.
The whole antecedent correction thing also irritated me whenever it appeared — not this, that. But with so much time and enjoyment and interest already invested there was no way I’d put it down — I had to push through, albeit a little quicker than before, especially when the focus returned to movies, pies, environmental atrocities, town names, etc.
It’s odd how in a novel like this, one that undermines conventional expectation of plot and character, it’s exactly plot and character that shine through when they do appear, as though made more valuable by scarcity. The determined lioness had my total attention throughout because she passionately wants something particular. Even the scrappy little submissive chicken coop mongrel that follows her seems more interesting than the narrator’s family, friends, and children, who other than Stace never really seemed to come to much life. Leo, loving and benevolent foil for everything awful related to men, appears off-stage throughout, an academic who specializes in bridges, which seems almost too thematically perfect in an associative novel? But none of this means I wasn’t in this one’s favor, just that like the country it’s explicitly about (it comes with a mini American flag suitable for sticking in a cupcake and was published on July 4), the gist is complicated, its glories and gore indivisible (same is true for lionesses apparently).
Two other semi-major dealios at play in my mind while reading: the author’s gender and geographic residence. I was attracted by this in part because it’s a massive brick of text by a woman. Women have written long novels. I’m pretty sure JK Rowling is a woman. But when it comes to experimental/unconventional mega-novels, other than Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which I own but haven’t read more than the first three pages of, it’s been a male domain. So I was interested in a Bernhardian mega-rant long sentence from the perspective of a middle-aged Midwestern woman who has “led a pretty shark-free, tornado-free, hurricane-free, cyclone-free, volcano-free, war-free, bomb-free-, plane-crash-free, gun-rampage-free, rape-free, murder-free, electrocution-free existence” (pg 703), that is, her perspective is privileged and self-aware — she’s a cancer survivor and suffering from health care costs but she’s not a victim run by the author through a cruel-fate wringer to make a single clear socially relevant point or maximize poignancy.
The author also was born and raised in the US but now lives in Scotland, so there’s something there too, a sense of displacement or exile or criticism from afar that I liked sometimes thinking about as I read, the sense that the author is not the narrator although probably in many ways not NOT the narrator either. But regardless of reductions related to current spatial occupancy and gender, since the vast majority of novels exist on a uniform and thereby Utopian and universal plane of bound whitish pages covered in ordered lines of blackish print, it’s the author’s sensibility and the reader’s engagement and activated imaginative capacities that matter most.
At times I wished the author had supplied a narrator with more range, especially when it came to cultural reference. All the references, from Little House on the Prairie to “The Sound of Music,” made the narrator seem much older than someone who seemed to be essentially my age, so where was she in the ’80s and early ’90s? Only watching Harrison Ford movies? What about MTV? U2? Nary a mention of wholly American exports like hip hop or Nirvana, let alone Tortoise (one of the reasons I love Knausgaard, who talks about Tortoise in one of the volumes).
I guess I’m talking about the point where relatability meets believability. The fact that frequent cultural references are related to old-timey not-very-PC prairie life (LHOTP) and Nazi Germany (TSOM) almost undermines believability because it seems contrived by the author to reflect on a contemporary Red State. Lack of random references to wholly American late ’80s hair metal like Ratt and Whitesnake made this less relatable and less believable than it could have been. It almost seemed like the author had this story about an older (like in her sixties or seventies) Ohioan pie baker sitting around for a while but then blew it up with contemporary American politics and made her younger? Really just thought about this a few days after finishing — it wasn’t a concern while reading. But the cultural references suggest an older narrator, or one who stopped paying attention to pop culture at some point when she would’ve been in her late teens?
Another thing I was thinking about, early on at least, was how the hell could something this good not be published by a single American publisher? (It’s North American publisher in September will be Biblioasis, which is based in Canada.) I shook my fist at American publishers. But then by page 600 or so, with 400 to go, yeah, OK, I get it, I see how they respectfully declined. But it’s discouraging that there aren’t at least a handful of indie presses in the US that might have seemed like natural choices for taking a shot at this, like for example an Archipelago Books that primarily published novels originally written in English by Americans (even if they currently live elsewhere).
So, ultimately, I found this worth the time spent with it, exciting and rewarding and “great” at first, but then less so the longer it got — it could’ve been like 350 to 500 pages shorter and not suffered a bit, except who knows if I would have ordered a merely 500-page novel all the way from the UK. Extreme length is essential to its marketing but also combined with minimal formal variety — its equability, ultimately — it probably won’t be all that celebrated in the end. But I’d definitely recommend it to those who wouldn’t mind getting a taste of this one’s greatness without worrying about every single word (how many among us have read every single footnote in Infinite Jest or every single line describing murdered women in 2666?) and want to support ambitious individuated unconventional literature with limited commercial potential.
Note: I haven’t read Lucy Ellmann’s previous novels but will try to do so soon. If so, I’ll add a postscript here.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).