Frank’s younger half-sister, Zoe, is frequently mistaken for his wife because she is Black - their mother remarried a Black man. The relationships themselves rarely feel lived-in. (A recent Times of London profile, after breathlessly proclaiming, “Move over Sally Rooney,” noted that Mellors is “already in discussion with several streamers.”) The city’s surfaces are attended to in cinematic detail emotional connective tissue often consists of characters telling their friends about their awful childhoods and narrating character traits direct to camera. Even for those without support, it’s a shabby-chic life.Ī more fundamental concern is how easy it would be to imagine this pre-recession Gotham universe as a Netflix series. Trust funds and inheritances shelter them. And while some are temporarily broke, no one is poor.

The older ones are “people who had found the intersection between creativity and economy, who made beautiful things but did not suffer for it.” Many of the guests have flown into Manhattan from different parts of the world, carrying origin stories and ethnicities that do too much of the work of explaining who they are. The younger characters are all creative and struggling to find themselves. This second chapter, the wedding reception, provides an extended party scene that introduces the supporting players who populate the novel. Whatever has passed between Cleo and Frank - dates, arguments, a proposal - has occurred off the page. It’s a daring leap for the lovers and also for Mellors, her fast-forward a clever way of rendering courtship as a heedless blur, the details only coming into focus once a marriage has set (or curdled). It’s a scant six months later, and the pair’s friends are as surprised as the reader. The next scene opens on the couple’s wedding day. Their first conversation turns into an exchange of witty remarks that leads to dinner and flirtation.

They’ve both left a New Year’s Eve party.

Hers is a city of flash and fluttering movement, as if deliberately designed to distract its inhabitants (or those Mellors chooses to depict) from seeing that, beneath the surface, there’s no there there.Ĭleo - beautiful, blond and British - meets Frank - older, handsome and an award-winning advertising executive - in an elevator 90 minutes before the first day of 2007. If Manhattan were a drug, which one would it be? This is one of the profound questions raised by reading Coco Mellors’ tantalizing but blithe debut novel, “ Cleopatra and Frankenstein,” whose Manhattanites run on stimulants and drown in alcohol. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Cleo and frankenstein