Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

Take Cleo: when her marriage falls apart, so does she – face first.

The text overflows with descriptions of how people look (spoiler: amazingly beautiful) and what they’re wearing (spoiler: amazing outfits) – but as Cleopatra and Frankenstein marches on, that ostensible vacuity seems more and more like a sly commentary on the world the couple inhabit, where appearances are anything but inconsequential. Their wedding present from Cleo’s best friend Quentin (a faux- Fabergé egg filled with cocaine) begins to seem symbolic of the marriage’s dynamic – beautiful on the surface, chaos at its core. He cried!”- the couple meet each other as people rather than a curated selection of their best party tricks.Ĭombined with their fair share of extramarital entanglements, his drinking and her melancholy look set to undo them. After a whirlwind wedding – “Our witness was the guy from the street cart outside. Having sketched a Manic Pixie Dream Queen and Charming Cynic, Mellors wastes little time in tipping icy cold buckets of nuance down their two-dimensional collars. Half-joking, the pair plan a spontaneous trip to Mexico – “He had the means, just not the incentive here was Cleo with the opposite” – and the rest, as they say, is history. That felt really good”) and dysfunctional coping mechanisms (“large doses of alcohol and repression”) that make him a perfect counterweight to her buoyant fragility.

Meanwhile, Frank – 20 years Cleo’s senior – has the sort of professional success (“I won an award for an ad I directed. The soon-to-be-couple stroll through the New York night together, making acerbic quips about passers-by.Īnnouncing that she has “switched to an antidepressant that actually allows to achieve orgasm again”, Cleo is swiftly established as sexy and sad. As their veneer of easy glamour accumulates scuffs and bruises, the fashionable side of things falls away to leave only ache – it’s an existential crisis dressed to the nines and stretched over 300-odd pages.īeret-wearing painter Cleo and twinkly wunderkind Frank meet in a lift, leaving the same New Year’s Eve party. The debut novel from Coco Mellors follows an achingly fashionable couple dancing through an achingly fashionable New York.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors