Reads & Reviews: Cleopatra and Frankenstein.

A blistering tale of really stupid character decisions, age gaps, and substance abuse.

Reads & Reviews: Stories that I’m reading and reviewing. It’s in the name.

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 stars.

This was the kind of book where you saw the emotions. Witnessing the characters and their dimensions is such vividly fictional writing. But I never really felt what any of the characters were feeling. And not in the sense that I needed to see myself in any of these people’s lives because to be Frank (pun intended) I did not at all expect to see a dark-skinned black woman anywhere within those pages, let alone to be represented well.

But what I’d hoped for, was an innate understanding that these were people. And at times they seemed like it. Zoe and her insatiable need to be seen but not without its dangers, and Santiago’s struggle with weight loss and food and feeling like his issues never even mattered under the crushing weight of all these other fucked up white people from New York.

 But at the heart, when it came to Cleo and Frank, I didn’t feel what they felt. I knew what they felt because I read the book, but then the book ended and I still can’t identify any emotion that jumped out at me.

And maybe it’s meant to be that way. Maybe the story was hidden under layers of faltering feelings, the same way life often is, but this was my issue with Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, someone Coco Mellors is often compared to.

Conversations With Friends had a running theme of equally running conversations that often went nowhere. Characters came in and out of their own emotions so quickly that I wasn’t sure what I’d feel when I turned the page. Sometimes this is done well. Other times, it is a burden to read.

I gave Conversations With Friends the benefit of the doubt because I was sure that the open-ended plot lines were an allegory for how conversations with friends are often open-ended. It is a reach, I’m aware, but it at least put the story in perspective for me.

With Cleopatra and Frankenstein, I read and read and read about emotions that I’d felt before, but I couldn’t understand why said emotions weren’t exploding off the page the way I expected them to. I read about Cleo’s difficulty with her mother’s death and understood her anger and sadness. I read about Frank’s alcoholism and the possibility that it was generational, and Zoe’s brief fear that it would show in herself as well, just by being related to Frank and despite not having the same father. I understand that too. 

But in all of this, the only conclusion I came up with was that there were too many people and too many stories for any of them to feel important to me.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

SOLO CHAPTERS.

The book took on a structure that broke up each front-facing character’s life into one chapter. However, I will only be covering characters that I care about.

QUENTIN

Quentin’s chapter was perhaps the most interesting one to me. It vaguely explored his tumultuous relationship with his ex-boyfriend Johnny, his borderline obsessive relationship with Cleo, and his struggle with gender identity. 

I found him annoying but I was also rooting for his happiness. I was hoping that who he was and who he wanted to be would tie closer into his relationship with Cleo outside of obsessive friendship. 

Characters like Quentin are actually why I enjoy character studies in fiction so much. It takes a person that on the surface is a piece of someone else’s story, and then you peel back the soft flesh of their own story, the parts of their heart that are difficult to read about, but ultimately shape the whole story as it’s own identity. I’ll come back to the topic of identity later.

And then he became whatever the fuck that was in the later chapters.

ELEANOR

Eleanor was somewhat peculiar too because of the way Mellors tried to shoehorn a “not-like-other-girls” trope through a very tiny, microscopic contemporary lense. I like Elanor, for the most part. She was a little bit too me-coded with the whole “using humor to cope” thing, but her vignettes became a little tiresome towards the end.

Her relationship with Frank was… well it definitely existed. I, once again, saw how they were in love with each other without the slightest bit of physical intimacy, and this time some slivers of feeling seeped into me but it was still surface level. 

Eleanor was the complete opposite of Cleo, and that is when I stopped caring for her. The idea that in order for Frank to find his person, he had to be with someone with mediocre beauty (according to everyone around her), brown hair, someone that was close enough to his age, and most importantly, she was incredibly witty, with a “true writers empathy.”

Now, I have many thoughts on being the funny girl (which I will dissect in another newsletter), but it quickly became jarring that everyone pointed out how “not like Cleo” Eleanor was presented to be. And I was irate for both of them.

Comparison is the thief of joy, and in the case of these two women, Frank’s decision to be with Eleanor was because she wasn’t Cleo. Cleo was essentially a building block for Frank’s healthy relationship with Eleanor, and that can be somewhat realistic. Every relationship is a building block, but context considered, Cleo being a young “manic pixie dream girl” caricature that shouldered Frank’s alcoholism, and Eleanor’s “down-to-earth” personality that Frank was able to settle down with were simply two sides of a very odd coin. I felt even more annoyed when Frank disclosed information about Cleo’s mother and her self-harm to Eleanor, who absolutely did not need to be privy to that information.

Regardless of intention, the execution made appreciating their love a lot harder for me.

CLEO AND FRANK:

I can’t express to you how much these two are not meant for each other. And even though that was the whole moral of the story, the way Cleo and Frank’s relationship developed, from the beginning elevator scene to them linking arms in Rome, not yet divorced but happily separated, was in my opinion, weird.

From the concept alone, I planned to read this book from a dramatic lens. All of the characters were in some way privileged and self-aware in the way a baby is self-aware. I still gave it the benefit of the doubt because surprise surprise, I like mess. But the concept of Cleo and Frank getting married after six months (for love of course, definitely not a visa), Only for a year to pass and both of them to realize that marrying someone you barely know might have been a flop. Who would’ve thought?

Frank, since the beginning, wasn’t ready to be married. In his pursuit  of falling for Cleo, he states clearly, “I thought I married an artist, not a housewife.” As a 42-year-old man, I’m sure he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings, one of them being the inability to settle down when he desired to. In marrying Cleo he believed that she was one-dimensional - evidently in the flowery way he used to describe her - which, in comparison to his pretty mundane but genuine appreciation of Eleanor just further proves my previous point. He expected Cleo to be a modernized trophy wife that he could decorate with new paints and easels. But when Cleo confronted him about his issues - as a partner does - He “Didn’t realize I affected you so much.” I found his avoidance of Cleo’s confrontations to be an interesting - if not annoying - contrast to the way he spoke so easily with Elanor. To him, Cleo is a young woman first, and a wife second. He expected her youth to mean that all the work that came with love would be overshadowed by a never-ending honeymoon period, or at least, one that lasted long enough.

Even when he pursues something with Eleanor, he still has an unsure air about it all. He and Cleo weren’t even fully separated before he approached Eleanor with a proposition of a “fresh start.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️

NEW YORK

The city that supposedly never sleeps. I haven’t read many books about New York but the one(s) I have read - namely Cleopatra and Frankenstein - is, to me, a glaring sign to read more books about New York.

The City itself is its own identity. In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, New York is detached from Esther, and despite being in a position of opportunity, she can’t help but feel out of place.

In Luster by Raven Leilani, New York, and its grimy edge is what Edie knows. There is no underbelly, only a stark reminder that to be black is to be a target, no matter how many people in a metropolitan city resemble you.

In Cleopatra and Frankenstein, New York does not feel like New York. And this is very rich coming from me considering the last time I stepped in the city was at age ten, but when I say it did not feel like New York, I mean that the characters were not a representation of the city.

Granted, the saying, birds of a feather flock together comes into play here, as Cleo admits towards the end of the book that she surrounds herself with “fucked up people.” But this is where the issue stands for me. None of these fucked up people are more than that.

With Quentin, his story ends unfortunately (he doesn’t die, but he’s not far from it) but it also ends abruptly in a paragraph.

Considering my earlier sentiments, this was incredibly disappointing. He and Cleo don’t remain friends which is likely for the best, but Quentin’s descent into… that, was difficult to write off as a “something that just happens.”

Back to the topic of New York, the issue of identity can’t be explored greatly by me because I don’t know shit about New York. But the diversity representation was weird, to say the least.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

CONCLUSION

An abrupt ending to this review but I don’t have much else to say really. The book in its entirety wasn’t horrible to me. Despite my negative ramblings, what I will give this book is that it was entertaining through and through. I considered the emotions I was feeling intentional because, at the very least, I don’t believe that there was any romanticization of bad habits. If anything I felt more or less adverse to the lifestyles of these people but even still I was intrigued.

⭐️⭐️⭐️