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A review by 3mmers
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I picked up this book not because I had any particular reason to expect to like it, but because in terms of publicity, it has everything going for it. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is all over Instagram thanks to its memorable title and compelling cover design. Its author looks like the secret fifth member of ABBA with a name like an early 00s tabloid star. Seriously, I spent a long time googling her trying to uncover a previous career as a less evil Perez Hilton that I was certain I half remembered from 2004.
Anyway. What a disappointment.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein is fine, but that’s about it. A big influence I felt while reading this book was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (which, controversially, I liked). This is a much more optimistic take on the same high-flying New Yorkers with artistic careers and mental health disorders. The appeal is both the human drama of unhappy people with the kind of eccentricities that you really only seem to get in New York (can you imagine some of this stuff happening to a person from Ohio? I can’t), and the voyeuristic literary tourism of the New York setting. Unfortunately, Coco Mellors is no Hanya Yanagihara. Yanagihara was a travel writer before becoming a novelist and you can absolutely tell. Her New York is illustrated with lush descriptions of expensive meals, humid parties, champagne-scented art shows. The book’s deep tragedy is juxtaposed with the greatest delights of a world class city. It’s something Mellors can’t match.
I felt this most acutely in the scene in which Frank and Cleo meet Cleo’s parents at a seafood restaurant in Grand Central Station (also, what’s the deal with this restaurant? The characters visit the same one for a tense family reunion in The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Surely y’all have more than one restaurant). The food arrives, interrupting the mortifyingly awkward conversation with this flaccid description:
Anyway. What a disappointment.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein is fine, but that’s about it. A big influence I felt while reading this book was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (which, controversially, I liked). This is a much more optimistic take on the same high-flying New Yorkers with artistic careers and mental health disorders. The appeal is both the human drama of unhappy people with the kind of eccentricities that you really only seem to get in New York (can you imagine some of this stuff happening to a person from Ohio? I can’t), and the voyeuristic literary tourism of the New York setting. Unfortunately, Coco Mellors is no Hanya Yanagihara. Yanagihara was a travel writer before becoming a novelist and you can absolutely tell. Her New York is illustrated with lush descriptions of expensive meals, humid parties, champagne-scented art shows. The book’s deep tragedy is juxtaposed with the greatest delights of a world class city. It’s something Mellors can’t match.
I felt this most acutely in the scene in which Frank and Cleo meet Cleo’s parents at a seafood restaurant in Grand Central Station (also, what’s the deal with this restaurant? The characters visit the same one for a tense family reunion in The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Surely y’all have more than one restaurant). The food arrives, interrupting the mortifyingly awkward conversation with this flaccid description:
The ruby-red lobsters sat at the center, their shells cracked open to reveal the plump flesh within. Nestled around them were freshly shucked oysters, chubby pink prawns, green-lipped mussels, and clams the size of a human palm. Flimsy white paper cups of tartar sauce and thick slices of lemon finished the impressive display.
It’s clearly meant to evoke the glittering decadence of New York’s overpriced tourist traps, but the paragraph falls flat. Perhaps it’s the clichés of the ‘ruby-red lobsters’, ‘plump flesh’, and ‘chubby pink prawns’, or the tell-don’t-show of the ‘impressive display.’ I was underwhelmed before I’d even finished the paragraph. I still remember Yanagihara’s “JB snored juicily” because that adjective surprised me. The seafood is a microcosm of the whole book, which just isn’t written well enough to support its loose plot construction. When the subject matter is otherwise so mundane and naturalistic, I expect the writing to provide something more of interest.
The actual plot was fine. Whatever. It didn’t exactly blow my skirt right off. I preferred the young artist looking for direction in Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress. If we want to look at the young artiste involved with an older man who isn’t good for her, I liked it better in My Dark Vanessa, My Last Innocent Year, and Green Dot. I don’t really feel like Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s more neutral and ambivalent take on the relationship dynamic is really adding anything super significant. Sometimes people can just be bad for each other and being twice as old as your girlfriend isn’t actually that predatory — okay? I guess? I can watch a forty plus year old guy being an ill-suited date to a twenty-something in any romcom. I didn’t find Frank particularly charming and it felt like his flaws were mostly raised just to remind the reader that he isn’t necessarily malicious. Cleo’s problems didn’t hit any more effectively. After reading The Guest by Emma Cline, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and three quarters the of books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, I was starting to get exhausted by books about women who are dazzlingly attractive but also sad. There’s a limit to how much an ugly bitch such as myself can empathized with the experience of being suffocated by men throwing themselves at the hollow projection they’ve made of a beautiful woman. Believe it or not some of us go through our lives without men every throwing themselves at us in any way. This exhaustion was underlined by Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s one blindingly great scene.
I glimpsed, for a moment, a reality in which I loved this book.
Like A Little Life and Sirens & Muses, Cleopatra and Frankenstein bounces between narrators within Cleo and Frank’s social circle. One of these is Eleanor, a former screenwriter, who at thirty-seven, finds herself living back in her mother’s house, with a job she hates, no friends, no romantic prospects, and a father slowly dying of Parkinson’s. Unlike other narrators, Eleanor’s sections are told through extremely short vignettes, dramatically limiting Mellors’ usual ruminations, forcing her into dialogue and action. In one scene Eleanor and her mother go shopping on Black Friday, where, surrounded by pajama-ed customers, Eleanor breaks down.
The actual plot was fine. Whatever. It didn’t exactly blow my skirt right off. I preferred the young artist looking for direction in Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress. If we want to look at the young artiste involved with an older man who isn’t good for her, I liked it better in My Dark Vanessa, My Last Innocent Year, and Green Dot. I don’t really feel like Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s more neutral and ambivalent take on the relationship dynamic is really adding anything super significant. Sometimes people can just be bad for each other and being twice as old as your girlfriend isn’t actually that predatory — okay? I guess? I can watch a forty plus year old guy being an ill-suited date to a twenty-something in any romcom. I didn’t find Frank particularly charming and it felt like his flaws were mostly raised just to remind the reader that he isn’t necessarily malicious. Cleo’s problems didn’t hit any more effectively. After reading The Guest by Emma Cline, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and three quarters the of books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, I was starting to get exhausted by books about women who are dazzlingly attractive but also sad. There’s a limit to how much an ugly bitch such as myself can empathized with the experience of being suffocated by men throwing themselves at the hollow projection they’ve made of a beautiful woman. Believe it or not some of us go through our lives without men every throwing themselves at us in any way. This exhaustion was underlined by Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s one blindingly great scene.
I glimpsed, for a moment, a reality in which I loved this book.
Like A Little Life and Sirens & Muses, Cleopatra and Frankenstein bounces between narrators within Cleo and Frank’s social circle. One of these is Eleanor, a former screenwriter, who at thirty-seven, finds herself living back in her mother’s house, with a job she hates, no friends, no romantic prospects, and a father slowly dying of Parkinson’s. Unlike other narrators, Eleanor’s sections are told through extremely short vignettes, dramatically limiting Mellors’ usual ruminations, forcing her into dialogue and action. In one scene Eleanor and her mother go shopping on Black Friday, where, surrounded by pajama-ed customers, Eleanor breaks down.
“All men leave you!” I scream. “I still have a chance!”
“What exactly are you saying to me?” yells my mother.
“YOU CANNOT BE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!”
A man wheeling an overflowing shopping cart appears at the end of the aisle, gives me a terrified look, and heads the opposite way. I hold on to the display towel rack and bow my head.
“I want more, Ma,” I say. “Wouldn’t you?”
After this tiff, her mother ignores her until they are both coerced into a massage chair demonstration by an enthusiastic salesperson.
“Eleanor!” she calls over the vibrations of the chair.
“Ma!”
“I never wanted you to have less!” she says.
This scene reached down my throat and into my lungs to grab my heart. I cried reading it. I’m tearing up now just from copying it down.
It was like a keyhole into a book exploring the crushing existential weight of disappointment, of the relationship between two people, neither of whom understand why their life just somehow didn’t work out. I’m way deeper in my feels about this theoretical story of wasted potential than I am about yet another book about a girl who is so beautiful she can have whatever she wants if she could only want things that are good for her. Disappointment and underachievement aren’t easy to explore in fiction because they defy narrative and are inherently unsatisfying. Narratively it is more satisfying for Eleanor to eventually get together with Frank and live happily ever after, fulfilling her need for partnership and demonstrating his emotional maturity. But existentially it is disappointing that Eleanor’s answer is to just keep waiting, fulfillment will come along, eventually. Just keep waiting.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein wants quite badly to be a grounded book about emotionally ambivalent characters. A key theme is characters that are unhappy and unfulfilled even when they feel like they should be. Apparently good things — a rich patron, a beautiful younger wife — have unexpected consequences. Frank and Anders, the emotional immaturity brothers, have both been acting like nothing is wrong unless they acknowledge it for so long that they’ve become entirely incapable of self-reflection. Oops! All Manic Pixie Dream Girls. The various happy endings feel therefore trite and vaguely embarrassing. The only one that hits right for me is Cleo’s, which is by far the most ambiguous. If a few more of the characters had been invited to reflect on why the want the things they want, rather than just getting them, it might even have turned the story around for me. What doesn’t hit right is that the book’s only queer character, self-identified Gay Best Friend (yikes) Quentin, is the only character to get a truly bad ending. His narrative is set up for him to battle shame, embrace a more feminine presentation, and become less codependent on shitty boyfriends and expensive drugs. Instead, Cleo loses contact with him when he becomes addicted to meth. It’s by far the darkest fate in the book and feels particularly out of place since everyone else gets a happily ever after. Even serial philanderer Anders gets a long-term girlfriend and a dog. The optics of Quentin’s fate are deeply unflattering in a book that otherwise seems to take the criticism that Friends has too many white people in it as a personal challenge.
Considering all the hype it has received, I was hoping that Cleopatra and Frankenstein would be really good, but it isn’t really anything at all. There are some good ideas, but frankly I just don’t get why the novel went in the direction it did. Why invest so heavily in the ambivalent emotional crises of a bunch of characters just to pair them off with their one true love at the end? Why invoke so many iconic sights and sounds of New York if you have little to offer but clichés? Why carefully construct a diverse social group if you’re going to end with your only gay characterdropping out to drug addiction ? If all you see in this novel is an easy way to fill up an Instagram graphic then, genuinely, I get it, but beyond that this book barely holds up to the most cursory read.
It was like a keyhole into a book exploring the crushing existential weight of disappointment, of the relationship between two people, neither of whom understand why their life just somehow didn’t work out. I’m way deeper in my feels about this theoretical story of wasted potential than I am about yet another book about a girl who is so beautiful she can have whatever she wants if she could only want things that are good for her. Disappointment and underachievement aren’t easy to explore in fiction because they defy narrative and are inherently unsatisfying. Narratively it is more satisfying for Eleanor to eventually get together with Frank and live happily ever after, fulfilling her need for partnership and demonstrating his emotional maturity. But existentially it is disappointing that Eleanor’s answer is to just keep waiting, fulfillment will come along, eventually. Just keep waiting.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein wants quite badly to be a grounded book about emotionally ambivalent characters. A key theme is characters that are unhappy and unfulfilled even when they feel like they should be. Apparently good things — a rich patron, a beautiful younger wife — have unexpected consequences. Frank and Anders, the emotional immaturity brothers, have both been acting like nothing is wrong unless they acknowledge it for so long that they’ve become entirely incapable of self-reflection. Oops! All Manic Pixie Dream Girls. The various happy endings feel therefore trite and vaguely embarrassing. The only one that hits right for me is Cleo’s, which is by far the most ambiguous.
Considering all the hype it has received, I was hoping that Cleopatra and Frankenstein would be really good, but it isn’t really anything at all. There are some good ideas, but frankly I just don’t get why the novel went in the direction it did. Why invest so heavily in the ambivalent emotional crises of a bunch of characters just to pair them off with their one true love at the end? Why invoke so many iconic sights and sounds of New York if you have little to offer but clichés? Why carefully construct a diverse social group if you’re going to end with your only gay character
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Drug use, and Suicide
Moderate: Animal death