‘Mimi’, by Lucy Ellmann – review

Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison finds himself prostrate on the icy sidewalk of Madison Avenue. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says a plump, sweaty-faced middle-aged woman as she hauls him to his feet.

This is Mimi, the antithesis of Harrison’s neurotic patients, and — it transpires, after a few more twists and turns — the love of his life. Harrison has recently parted from pretentious Gertrude, a woman who conceived a child by ‘parthenogenesis’ and ‘batiks without irony’.

Mimi is outspoken, generous, sexually inventive; her feet are huge, her flesh bulges out round her bra straps. With her, Harrison discovers that ‘True love is a FACT…Real love is ferocious.’

For the first two-thirds of the novel, the section concerned with Harrison’s life in Manhattan and his childhood memories of a small town devoted to the manufacture of chewing-gum, the pace and energy of the prose whirls the reader along. If you pause for breath, you might think that scatty Harrison, who can’t boil a potato without injury, doesn’t convince as a sought-after surgeon. You might even feel (whisper it low) that Mimi’s half-digested ‘feminist’ rants are a little wearisome.

But I could overlook such problems because I was thrilled by a love story whose heroine is both passionate and peri-menopausal — Harrison’s word, and I liked him for being prepared to use it. I was amused by his list-making (‘Why I Hate Bathrobes’) and intrigued by Ellmann’s inclusion of musical scores, even though I can’t read them. And I was bowled over by the references to Angela Banner’s Ant and Bee books.