Mimi by Lucy Ellmann: review But Harrison might just as well be a bus driver for most of the novel, which takes place while he is off sick from his job, comfortably at home with Bach, Bette Davis and a stray cat, ingesting soup and trading wisecracks with his artist sister on the phone. Ellmann is a brilliant purveyor of slapstick. Great moments include Harrison sliding along on his "well-iced ass," getting drunk while looking after a $48,000 quilt, and enduring "the museum of annoying folksiness" for Mimi's sake. Ellmann steams ahead when she encounters a worthy subject to pillory, like the "women who want to be babes, and men who want the Berlusconi makeover, so they can date babes." But there is also a lot of ephemera. Mimi is unusual in its vehemence about jam and quilts and sexual contentment, while also haranguing you about patriarchal culture, male conquest of women, or human conquest of animals. As if in homage to the female artistry Mimi bangs on about, the novel becomes a patchwork of bits and bobs. We get Mimi's take on various unconnected movies, and non sequiturs that shoehorn in bugbears and obsessions ("I quickly changed the subject to Haydn"). Ellmann's hallmark banter is fun to read but runs the risk of being a bit gimmicky: the illustrations, ever-ready puns, excerpts from a notebook enumerating Mimi's "perimenopausal" hot flushes, the lists upon lists, including Harrison's "list of melancholy" that he is forever adding to: "Pregnant women pushing strollers uphill like Sisyphus - just stop breeding, why don't you?" The non-stop italics add to the occasional sensation of reading the notes for a stand-up routine. Ellmann's idiosyncrasies are lovable and can be wickedly funny, but require some indulgence from the reader, and, if the reader is not in an indulgent mood, might start to grate. "Perhaps that's the point?" became a question I found myself asking a little too often. Then Mimi disappears for a large chunk of the plot (I can't say I missed her), while personal tragedy leads Harrison, quite incongruously, to Canterbury. His descriptions of "Angstland and the Anguish" are something of a plot hiatus. Afterwards it gets weirdly, sincerely zealous as Harrison, under Mimi's tutelage, becomes the fanatical proponent of a global feminist revolution, the central tenet being that everybody should have more sex. The first-person narrative makes it hard to gauge how much irony is intended, which is slightly unnerving, especially when it's followed by a mammoth appendix including recipes, newspaper headlines inventorying violence against women, a manifesto for the transfer of all economic power to women, a catalogue of the works of an imaginary artist, as if emptying a shoebox full of jottings onto the page. The central unlikelihood that a high-powered plastic surgeon would convert into an evangelical feminist is surmountable; this is a comic novel. The novel's main sticking point is that sexual contentment and romantic fulfilment are a lot less interesting to read about than they are to participate in. And yet, Harrison's childhood memories are poignant and hilarious, his observations of the natural world provocative. Taken in pieces, Mimi holds a lot to entertain and inflame. Mimi by Lucy Ellmann 352pp, Bloomsbury, t £11.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £12.99, ebook £8.51)