The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Man or Mango?: A Lament by Lucy Ellmann
Michael Reder

Lucy Ellmann. Man or Mango?: A Lament. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 240 pp. $22.00.

Man or Mango? is a fictional collage composed of many narrative voices interspersed with pictures, drawings, excerpts from a (fictional) student’s notebook, quotations from history books, literature, newspapers, the Guinness Book of World Records, a variety of nineteenth-century scientific materials on ants and bees, and lists—lots of lists. The characters address the reader directly in the vein of Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over or Martin Amis’s Success. Eloïse, a self-described hermit, has a wry sense of humor and a penchant for making lists. George, whose narrative is peppered with phrases in all CAPITAL LETTERS, is an American writer living in London trying to finish his EPIC POEM ON ICE HOCKEY. The book includes an assortment of supporting characters, including Ed, a burglar by profession whose true passion is growing huge vegetables and who sends letter bombs to female news reporters as a hobby; Venetia, George’s rich, dull, and sexually insatiable patroness; an Evil Doctor; the Earth; and three “Old Biddies” who compose a gang of geriatric shoplifters. The characters’ lives don’t seem to intersect until the second part of the novel, when we realize that they are each planning a holiday at the same seaside hotel in Ireland. This disparate group of people all share a similar destiny, and Man or Mango? moves from being merely a meditation on burglars and bombs, relationships and gigantic vegetables, to much larger issues of life, death, nature, and human folly in the face of history. Ellmann’s postmodern pastiche is full of verve and substance, and reminds me of the best work of Amis, Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, and even Ishmael Reed. In spite of sharing similar ingredients with the books of these writers, Man or Mango? is thoroughly original, and offers us entertainingly piercing insight into the human predicament. [Michael Reder]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Man or Mango?: A Lament by Lucy Ellmann Michael Reder Lucy Ellmann. Man or Mango?: A Lament. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 240 pp. $22.00. Man or Mango? is a fictional collage composed of many narrative voices interspersed with pictures, drawings, excerpts from a (fictional) student’s notebook, quotations from history books, literature, newspapers, the Guinness Book of World Records, a variety of nineteenth-century scientific materials on ants and bees, and lists—lots of lists. The characters address the reader directly in the vein of Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over or Martin Amis’s Success. Eloïse, a self-described hermit, has a wry sense of humor and a penchant for making lists. George, whose narrative is peppered with phrases in all CAPITAL LETTERS, is an American writer living in London trying to finish his EPIC POEM ON ICE HOCKEY. The book includes an assortment of supporting characters, including Ed, a burglar by profession whose true passion is growing huge vegetables and who sends letter bombs to female news reporters as a hobby; Venetia, George’s rich, dull, and sexually insatiable patroness; an Evil Doctor; the Earth; and three “Old Biddies” who compose a gang of geriatric shoplifters. The characters’ lives don’t seem to intersect until the second part of the novel, when we realize that they are each planning a holiday at the same seaside hotel in Ireland. This disparate group of people all share a similar destiny, and Man or Mango? moves from being merely a meditation on burglars and bombs, relationships and gigantic vegetables, to much larger issues of life, death, nature, and human folly in the face of history. Ellmann’s postmodern pastiche is full of verve and substance, and reminds me of the best work of Amis, Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, and even Ishmael Reed. In spite of sharing similar ingredients with the books of these writers, Man or Mango? is thoroughly original, and offers us entertainingly piercing insight into the human predicament. [Michael Reder]

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