The heroine of Lucy Ellmann's new novel is one of an increasingly rare breed in modem fiction - a virgin. Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood). But whereas the high-minded Brookner woman is given to maundering over Balzac or Flaubert, Isabel derives her vicarious thrills from the soft-centred romantic novels of one Babs Cartwheel (373 of them, and counting). According to Ms Cartwheel, 'when the right man appears, he will appreciate finding your virginity intact,' which in Isabel's case sounds like making a virtue out of a necessity. Her addiction to this junk affects not just her social demeanour but her narrative mode, a matter of breathless one-sentence paragraphs and stupefying sentiment - 'my destiny was to love, but to love always tragically.'

LRB 29 August 1991 | PDF Download