[READ: March 10, 2021] Things Are Against Us
I loved Ellmann’s book Ducks, Newburyport so much that I had intended to read all of her books.
So I’ve gone back and read some of her previous novels. Which I found to be…okay. They were mildly amusing with some very personal diatribes thrown in to put some passion into these otherwise comic novels.
Then I saw that she had a recent collection of essays, which I thought might be really interesting.
I agree about 95% with everything Ellmann says in this book. And yet I hated this book more than almost anything I’ve read recently. And I think I’m not going to bother reading the other novels that I haven’t read yet, since the other two weren’t that great anyhow.
Ellmann’s style in these essays is so unpleasant, so superior and self-righteous, so… (and I hate to use this word because of the anti-feminist implications of it but it is definitionally accurate) strident, that I almost didn’t finish most of the essays (I forced my way through to the end of all of them). Strident, btw: “presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively and unpleasantly forceful way. I mean, that is this book to a T.”
In the past, strident women have been very important to many movements. But hen your arguments are so scattershot, it’s hard for your stridency to be a positive force.
“Things Are Against Us”
In this essay Ellmann all caps the word THINGS every time she writes it. On the first page (which is half a page not including the title), THINGS appears over 30 times. The tone is kind of amusing–about how things get in our way and cause us trouble: Things slip out of your hand; things trip you, things break. Then each following paragraph gets more specific. Clothes tear, socks don’t stay up. Matches won’t light, water bottles spill. Then she gets into the body. In her novel Doctors & Nurses she lists 12 pages of bodily ailments. So there’s not much new here. And there’s no real point. It doesn’t end with any grand idea. It just stops. (more…)
