Lucy Ellmann is angry about everything, especially men

Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was the Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which relayed the internal life of an Ohioan mother of four via a single sentence across 1,000 pages. Her publisher tells me that between the proof and final publication of Things Are Against Us, Ellman made 1,700 changes. She is, in short, an undoubted paragon of highbrow meticulousness.

Then again and on the other hand, no, Ellmann is not being serious at all here. Things consists mostly of pieces written before the pandemic but is nonetheless influenced by the plague world into which it emerges, reacting against solemnity with provocation. She supplies her own epigraph:

In times of pestilence, my fancy turns to shticks. They seem almost innocent to me, my scruples and my scorn, now that the whole human experiment seems to be drawing to a close.

It has, not a table of contents, but a ‘table of discontents’.

The things with which Ellmann is discontented range from bras (‘Breasts are detainees — tracked, branded, interrogated, maligned, discouraged, and “supported’’’) to Brexit (‘the apotheosis of age-old British self-hatred’). She is angry about electricity, which she calls ‘a kind of ethereal rapist, interfering with everyone’. She is annoyed that men eat so much pizza (‘just a big hot slippery blop of dough’), but also that people expend attention on healthy eating: ‘So much time is devoted to the self, there’s none left for society. Americans count the calories, not the capitalists.’

She is furious about the pervasiveness of travel: ‘You don’t have to poo and pee and copulate and take snapshots of well-known landmarks in every country on Earth, you know? It’s not the law,’ she writes in ‘The Lost Art of Staying Put’.