Ali’s mother, also, is the wrong kind of woman; as is a stranger eating a boiled egg (the white caught “in the bristles on her top lip”), a life model (no signs of “inner life”), anyone who has ever sent a nude (“get some self-respect”), anyone who Ali perceives as “achieving hairlessness without pain or ugliness” (“all other women”), anyone who Ali perceives as “wearing things based on who they wanted to be that day” (again, all other women), an ageing radio presenter (her once “neat and silky” body now besmirched by “plump features … like modern extensions to an old house”), a model in an advert for self-tanner (described in painstaking detail alongside ketchup dripping off a burger bun) and a dead girl.
It is Ali’s bad luck to be both specimen and scientist, and the bad luck of tackling this particular subject that reading Ali’s thoughts on other women – other specimens – should feel so unsettlingly brutal.
Ali opens a computer folder to find “a palette of peach tones … like the stained glass at Coventry Cathedral”: every nude picture Ed has ever received from women, including her own.
The novel opens with a description of the “generous round” of Ed’s “belly, hanging over his jeans”; the epilogue makes sure to let us know that Ed’s shirts no longer fit him, and he is now forced to wear something that “looks like a nightie”.
In a world where a sexual predator is in the White House for the second time, Harvey Weinstein has appealed his convictions, and Louis CK won a Grammy for his post-cancellation return to standup, it feels strangely naive for a character to fume over “heels, the patriarchy … underwire, the patriarchy … everything, the patriarchy”, as if naming it might make it go away.
