Things Are Against Us

By Lucy Ellmann

'There are three kinds of strike I'd recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can't wait for the first two.'
Things Are Against Us is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted Lucy Ellmann. Bold, angry, despairing and very, very funny, these essays cover everything – from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rages against bras, gives Doris Day and Agatha Christie a drubbing, and pleads for sanity in a world that – well, a world that spent four years in the company of Donald Trump, that 'tremendously sick, terrible, nasty, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, zero-chance lying liar'.
Things Are Against Us is electric. It's vital. These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket. Lucy Ellmann is the writer we need to guide us through these crazy times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913111212

Lucy Ellmann

Lucy Ellmann is the author of Ducks, Newburyport, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. She was born in Illinois and dragged to England as a teenager. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament, Dot in the Universe, Doctors & Nurses and Mimi. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Reviews for Things Are Against Us

[davidwineberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lucy Ellmann has a reputation for being an excruciatingly funny writer. It’s all been in novels, award-winning novels. Seven of them. Now, she has published Things Are Against Us, a collection of 14 essays, four of which have never been published before. Not being big on novels, this is my first exposure to her work.It is angry. Ellmann complains about everything, and every aspect of everything. Even the TOC is labeled the Table of Discontents. Outside of orgasms and money, nothing seems to rate for her. She is against electricity. She is against travel. She is against teens explaining their morning routines on youtube. Mostly, she is against men. She sums up men early on:“What riches there once were, what beauties! Raindrops on roses and crop tops on cuties. Now it’s just tear gas and water hoses, and Mexican children tied up with strings. These are a few of their favourite things. Quarry every mountain, wreck every stream.” At times, it can be termed satirical. In by far her longest essay, she proposes a three strikes and you’re out series – of strikes against men. Her evidence of the need is with things like: “Men obliterate beavers so they can build their own dams! “ Strike one is withholding housework, since no man has any clue how to do it himself. Along the way, she declares a moratorium on discussing anyone’s looks. During the strike, there is to be no talking about anyone’s appearance for one year. “The beauteous would survive a slight lessening of attention and acclaim, and the rest of us could relax. After a year of such abstinence I’d bet we’d be cured of the habit and be much better conversationalists.“ Strike two is no more war work, which soon devolves into just no work at all. She specifies to “withhold women’s labour in the workforce, because after all, who wants to WORK?” (Her caps.)Strike number three is the good old withholding of sex, from the playbook of the Ancient Greeks. Money for sex is the aim, a theme Ellmann comes back to in later essays as well. It’s all about the money, ultimately. She wants men to fork over all their money and let women run the world. This comes up throughout the book.Three strikes and they’re out of wealth and power. And if that doesn’t work, there is a fourth strike she is holding in reserve: pizza. Ellmann hates pizza (too), and insists all women hate it. Men force it on them, whenever possible. Prevent pizza, and you can rule the world. Apparently.That all this conflicts directly with her complaints about women spending so much time on fashion, makeup and jewelry, presumably to obtain favors from men, is not broached. We wouldn’t want sense to interfere with the essence of these essays.This essay, called simply Three Strikes. is both improved and hobbled by an astonishing amount of footnotes. The footnotes are a good five times as long as the essay. It makes for very choppy reading, trying to make both streams work at the same times. The footnotes are full of references to books, websites, newspaper and magazine articles to back her anecdotal charges, which is good. But as literature, it needs work.Things Are Against Us is the title of both the book and the first essay. The essay is about THINGS. The word THINGS is always capitalized, and appears seemingly hundreds of times, as virtually every little THING is grating, annoying, defective or malevolent. THINGS are out to get her, much like Woody Allen’s early battles with appliances. It is a jarring read, and brings up Ellmann’s mains stylistic tic – lists. She loves long lists of items to complain about. She can be creative with them, making them rhyme, or listing the items alphabetically, or adding something bizarrely irrelevant to break them up. But they do seem endless. The lists can be nouns, verbs or adjectives; doesn’t help. They quickly become predictable and forgettable.She reminds me specifically of James Thurber, who used to do this in some of the hundreds of essays he published, mainly in the New Yorker. Thurber would write about a letter of the alphabet, or a topic of general interest, or of someone in his family. He would make lists; he would exhaust the subject. It got to be very unfunny and most tiresome. Ellmann differentiates herself though, because she has created a persona to do all the complaining and expand on the bitterness. This nasty character can be as obnoxious as Ellmann wants her to be, and get away with it. The persona does not have to be rational, logical or even conscious of how obnoxious she is. She has created a distinct character. Think of Jack Benny being stingy. Or WC Fields hating small children. Or Bill Dana being a Mexican immigrant. Or Brent Terhune being a right wing extremist. Well done, Lucy Ellmann. For Ellmann, a Midwesterner now living in Scotland, it began when she was a child, learning that Lake Erie was officially dead: no plants or animals could exist there any more. “This developed into a disdain for fashion, new buildings, the space program, tree surgery, polyester, pharmaceutical companies, men with short hair, witch-burning, and the Industrial Revolution.” It doesn’t have to make sense; a lot of people find this hilarious. You have to go with it. Here and there she makes good points, of course. Men have trashed the planet (though she provides no evidence women would have done better). After that, they are going to Mars to do the same. Or this: “Who in hell cares about Robert Oppenheimer’s conscience, one of the tiniest things in the universe. Nuclear bombs should never have been produced. “On the other hand, she seems to have some predilections that really need explaining. Pizza, for one. Crime fiction, she says, is an obscenity, and not reading it is a feminist act. She thinks everyone should stay home, because everyone now has the world at their fingertips: “You’re nothing as an artist these days unless you’ve spent a month in New Mexico, the Arctic, Trinidad, Tibet and Sumatra, and regularly attend the Venice Biennale. People forget that reality is wherever you are. It’s what you’re thinking about that matters.” So for Ellmann, Van Gogh would have been better off never discovering Provence and staying in rainy Belgium instead. In some way, this is both wacko and sidesplittingly funny.There’s a very odd essay on teenage girls making youtube videos of their morning routines. Ellmann attacks viciously, as usual, calling them shallow, friendless shills for consumer products and so on. I’m sure she would have been one of them had it been possible in her time. I can’t imagine why she bothers to spend so much vitriol on these kids. Young people will reach for the stars however they can. Boys will go after sports scholarships, for a possible stint as a national sports star, for example. (Maybe that’s Ellmann’s next subject? Oh, I can see it already: “These humongous sixteen year olds, strutting the streets with their thumbs hitting their sides, because their egregious upper bodies are so out of proportion their arms can’t hang properly. Their entire left arms are festooned with blue tattoos so dense their arms look like they’ve been mangled in one of those old-fashioned wringer washing machines men invented to keep women in their place. These boys’ necks are as big as my thigh, which is really saying something with all the pizza I’ve been force fed against my will over the years. They are proto-men, whose only thought is to induce severe concussion in other proto-men, are the future leaders of the world if we don’t stop them now.” That, in a nutshell, is what an Ellmann essay reads like.) If social media is how young women see the fastest path to success, it’s because there is plenty of precedent. They are right. Good luck to them. The only reason I can think of for her cruelty is the laughs she will get from some readers. She’s like a Don Rickles of literature – the more vile the attacks, the funnier it all seems?Another good fat target is available in A Spell of Patriarchy, yet another essay oozing hate: “Women now bring home the bacon and cook it too. And men praise us for our autonomy – which leaves them free to watch their requisite ten hours of porn a day, decide on gender quotas, and pollute rivers.” Here, once again, she slams the upper body strength of men, which is one of those THINGS that infuriate her throughout the book.So while I appreciate the work Ellmann has put into creating this hateful persona, I don’t think I’ll be reading much more of it.David Wineberg