A review by lola425
Mimi by Lucy Ellmann

3.0

A good, but flawed book. I admit I often found myself laughing out loud. Harrison's relationships with the women in his life--with Bee, with Mimi, even with Gertrude--were the strongest part of the book. Harrison's conversion to a radical sort of feminism, as embodied by his manifesto, was distracting, almost beside the point, which is where the "flawed' part comes in, since the development of the manifesto is the skeleton upon which the rest of the book hangs. Which is not to say that the manifesto makes the whole book ridiculous, it doesn't. Like all modern day manifestos parts of it make total sense and other parts are just this side of cray-cray. The book is worth reading and not the mess that Christopher Buckley's review claims it is in the NYT Book Review. Buckley's review, in fact, probably supports the need for the existence of such a manifesto. Buckley seems to take major offense to Ellmann's appendix and the use of italics (wha?) which if such techniques were employed by the likes of, say, David Foster Wallace, might be lauded as post-nodernly genius-like. I am not saying that this book was a work of genius, but I won't dismiss it because Ellmann reach might have exceeded her grasp.