Readers need not scoff this giant 1,000-page pie in one gulp. Sampled at regular intervals, it tastes sweeter
heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s 1,000-page novel once had to endure a Wagner opera “so long it nearly killed me”. What would she, an over-worked, middle-aged mother-of-four who runs a baking business from her kitchen in Newcomerstown, Ohio , make of the mammoth slab of print that she narrates, for the most part, in one unbroken sentence?In this domestic epic, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, Ms Ellmann, an American-born novelist who lives in Scotland, seeks to make connections.
Thus the anxious soliloquy of an ordinary—but acute and well-informed—woman in contemporary America incrementally binds the human frame to the body politic, the neighbourhood rubbish to the pollution that has left the magnificent old Ohio river “full of mercury”. Ms Ellmann mourns ecosystems despoiled by modern humankind. The Native Americans of Ohio cherished their homelands for many millennia, but “the Europeans managed to justthe place in a few hundred years”.
Humans may have robbed the planet of its abundance, but their inner life teems and blooms: “there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on”. Ms Ellmann offers just one, over a single day. Her father, Richard Ellmann, wrote the definitive biography of James Joyce, and she nods to “Ulysses” and its everyday hero, Leopold Bloom. The narrator’s much-loved but absent husband is called Leo.
Readers need not scoff this giant pie in one gulp. Sampled at regular intervals, it tastes sweeter. The sheer ingenuity of Ms Ellmann’s wordplay, the fabulous profusion of her recipes, catalogues and inventories, from a freezer’s contents to confectionery brands, imbue every passage with fun as well as a sardonic poetry. Few novels have ever packed in so much culinary advice: the pies and cakes aside, see her chicken stock and beef chilli.
This onrush of introspection obliquely tells a sad family story. The sickness and early death of the narrator’s adored mother “wrecked my life”. Readers get to know devoted, dependable Leo and the four kids, “sulky Stace” , “pedantic Ben, obsessive Gillian, and pell-mell Jake”. They share the pensive protagonist’s self-doubt, shyness, memories of illness and her unwarranted belief in “the fact that” “I can’t love or be loved”.