“the fact that I don’t know how animals think but I think in spirals, dizzying spirals,”

I think that I might have been too ready to see the similarities between our narrator and the lioness. Certainly, when it comes to their maternal instincts and the burden of caring for offspring and putting their welfare before your own, there is a striking similarity. But this week’s reading has made me question my assessment. It seems Ellmann is up to something a bit more complex here, that the lioness serves as both a double and a foil for our narrator.

The brief scene about the lioness, the days spent lustily mating with the sire of her cubs is a marked contrast to our admittedly shy and even, as one guy she dated called her, “reticent” narrator. Here’s the lioness:

“When he clasped her tight from behind, she twisted round in surprise, but she subdued an impulse to growl. She settled beneath him, bearing more and more of his weight as he mounted her. Soon she was yowling in ecstasy, filling the forest with her pleas. At her urging he clung to her until she was all fuck, and every point of connection between them made her come—his every purr, his every thrust.”

Based on this description it’s difficult to imagine the narrator sharing this sentiment:

“the fact that I wish Leo and I had sex more, I do, the fact that I think our problem is neither of us is good at initiating,”

Just before the interlude on the lioness’s lusty mating, the narrator is stuck in the snowy cold, by the side of the road, hoping that a good Samaritan will drive by and help fix her flat tire. After the short passage about the lioness, the narrator is already back at home,

“the fact that it’s good to be indoors, warm and cozy, after my scary escapade, safe with my kids all around me,”

It takes us forty-four pages to learn how the narrator got out of her “scary escapade.” It’s one of the many examples of Ellmann’s excellent pacing in the novel. By this point, almost three hundred pages in, we’ve come to trust that unfamiliar names and references will be clarified and substantiated, eventually, if we just continue reading. In this respect, I’m curious as to how Ellmann crafted this novel. Did she start with several threads of the narrator’s experiences and life that she wanted to include and then draw each out, extending them with many, many, thoughts, and impressions sprinkled within? It seems a more disjointed, and perhaps for all of that, a more interesting way to depict memories.

In my experience, most novels that reflect the interior lives of their characters do so by depicting a memory more fully and chronologically—less disjointed, so to speak. (Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and James Joyce are exceptions.) If it is a transformative memory of the character we might see parts of it being remembered as a flashback, but still there appears to be more narrative structure to the recollection or experience. With Ellmann it is something quite different, but to my mind successful, about the way that she unspools the life of the narrator:

“the fact that I don’t know how animals think but I think in spirals, dizzying spirals,”