Varying Degrees Of Hopelessness
(Lucy Ellman)
Abrupt and curtailed chapters, characters who are entirely self-centred, and a thirty-something virgin who has learnt all she knows of love from the novels of 'babs cartwheel'. This is definitely NOT a piece of chick-lit... it is pure joy in a hundred and ninety-two perfect pages.
Obese Pol is viewed by our chief protaganist, Isabel, with great disdain. She wears revealing outfits, has interesting personal odours, and (so Isabel suspects) is rather vulgar. Yet Isabel is the ever-hopeful virgin, waiting for Mr Right to tear her asunder. Both of these females are students at a (fictional) London art college, where the lecturers are either obsessed with paintstrokes, heavily into sado-masochism or the kind of person who waits up a tree watching girls walk by. Into this world walks Robert, an American who was promised a job, but forgot to sign his actual contract, and thus is unemployed and newly arrived in London. He immediately becomes a key part of the make-up of Pol and Isabel's relationship, part of a foursome with a Handsome Young Person of a lecturer. Their love-lives, such as they are, are heavily interwoven.
Ellman writes in what I believe to be an original way; chapters may be no more than a sentence, or may be twenty pages. There are alternate versions of every group of events. There is also an obvious nod to Freud, and the world's current mother-obsessions, with chapters about all the main characters' mothers... and lack of fathers. Above all else this is a satire on modern life, not desiring to be taken seriously, but resonating none the less. A novel that both drives you to insane amounts of laughter (tip: do not read in public) and leaves you feeling as if you have contemplated the very nature of existence.
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