I think we can all agree: quick marriages between people who barely know one another are not a good idea. But they do make quite fun novels, as it turns out. That’s true at least for Cleopatra and Frankenstein, a positively inhalable debut by Coco Mellors about the fallout of a snap marriage between an older man and a younger woman.
Frank and Cleo are at a trendy New Year’s Eve party in New York when they meet by chance in a lift. He’s a fortysomething ad agency boss who drinks more than he should, weathering the disappointment of giving up his creative dreams to make money. She’s a beautiful British artist twenty years his junior, with long blonde hair and a visa that’s about to expire. Witty repartee and frantic snogging out of the way, they marry a few months later. Their wedding is peopled by the book’s supporting cast, who include Quentin, Cleo’s gender-confused trustafarian pal who secretly thinks they’re soulmates; Zoe, Frank’s financially dependent baby sister; and Anders, Frank’s ‘will shag any woman who walks’ best mate.
Their jumpstarted marriage offers rich terrain for Mellors to explore. Reading the novel post #MeToo, Mellors’ observations about the suspicions between men and women feel perceptive. The resilience – both financial and spiritual – needed to pursue a creative life is a recurrent theme, too. Even when Cleo’s painterly ambitions are effectively subsidised by Frank, she’s too depressed and damage to produce much work.
About halfway through the novel, the tone shifts abruptly. A chapter told entirely in first person fragments introduces us to Eleanor, a newbie freelancer at Frank’s agency. Coming out of nowhere, her quick wit is entrancing both to Frank and to us. Form, unfortunately for Cleo, looks to reflect content.
Otherwise Mellors’ writing is dialogue heavy, episodic in structure and full of rich scene setting. From the first chapter I wondered how long it would be before it becomes a TV show. It does have a tendency to be eyebrow-raisingly whimsical – at one point Frank buys Cleo a sugar glider off the internet to cheer her up . Cleo herself is the least interesting character, an ethereal, damaged waif who – of course – finds her wedding dress at the back of a vintage shop. She – of course – looks sickeningly gorgeous in it, even when she realises halfway through the wedding that it’s actually a nightdress (oh, woe!). And I’m curious as to why there are so many stories about younger women having steamy affairs with older men right now – is it subversive?
But Mellors does have a knack for an excellent sentence and she is wonderful at the ebb and flow rhythms of dialogue. She writes about the frustrations of bad sex brilliantly: Cleo explains to one gent that “this jabbing thing – it’s not sex. It’s you masturbating with my body instead of your hand.”
It’s all a riot to read, even when you slightly feel like you’ve been here before. There’s something reminiscent of A Little Life in the way that Mellors’ characters are at the mercy of their damage. During the Eleanor chapters, I felt as though I was reading Lorrie Moore or Patricia Lockwood. Booze-soaked frustrated artist Frank reminded me of a Richard Yates character, and a set-piece showdown with Cleo’s awful, new age healer step-mum called to mind a head-scarfed Olivia Colman in Fleabag.
And of course, someone will compare it to Sally Rooney, because someone always does. The sheer amount of deja vu made the reading experience feel almost nostalgic. But Mellors knows how to drive a story and write compelling characters, and I was intensely consumed by the world of Cleopatra and Frankenstein for a few happy days.
