Scan barcode
mc_easton's review against another edition
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Stylistically related to John Dos Passos, especially his U.S.A. trilogy, and the wilds of Robert Coover’s narrators (think A Public Burning), Ellmann tacks her ship in a different direction. If you’ve always wished a woman would hijack these experimental voices in service of a pie-baking, suburbanite housewife, then this is the novel for you. It may sound like I’m mocking Lucy Ellmann’s 998-page beast, but I emphatically am not. I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of assigned and recommended reading where men—most often a businessman or a wayward politician—spend hours on a train or behind the wheel of a car fretting over sales records or poll numbers, why breakfast tasted off, and whether he’ll be able to get it up that night. It’s high time that a mother baking pies, reflecting on her recovery from cancer, and worrying about toxins in drinking water gets equal literary treatment.
First, whatever else you may have heard, there is a story. But the narrator cannot get out of her own way—or the story’s—and this is the story, too. So we have the engine of a traditional plot, complete with foreshadowing, escalation, and a climax that made me weep and laugh hysterically all at once. We have an unexpected heroine and a villain, and the villain is quite easy to spot for any feminists out there—which adds to the suspense.
But for sheer page count, all that is the tiniest sliver. What makes up the bulk of this novel is stream of consciousness as the narrator goes about her life in a state of constant anxiety and complicated grief. She is exactly the white Gen X women I’ve known, and one senses Ellmann (in her mid-sixties) has both profound compassion and a shade of frustration with the generation right behind her own.
Punctuating this stream of consciousness, however, is the narrative of a cougar—also a mother—trying to survive in the landscape that humans have blighted. These passages are swift and deft—and very, very short. They are delivered in close-third from the cougar’s perspective, and the juxtaposition is powerful.
While our narrator frets endlessly (and ineffectually) about environmental destruction and her family’s safety, here we have another mind—one that is wholly engaged with reality here and now, who makes choices and takes action, and whose every thought is fit to purpose. In case you think I’m reaching, this is also the juxtaposition at the heart of the climax as well as the final lines of the novel. Ellmann is doing a lot with these pages, but above all, she is inviting us to stop spinning our wheels for a minute and instead just take action, however small that act or uncertain the outcome. It’s beautiful, really, to be reminded that we can save lives and even (hopefully) the planet if we just get out of our own way.
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body shaming, Cancer, Child abuse, Child death, Domestic abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Infidelity, Mental illness, Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Terminal illness, Violence, Police brutality, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Medical trauma, Stalking, Death of parent, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Sexual harassment, and Colonisation