Lucy Ellmann: Let them eat cake

Lucy Ellmann creates an alarming comic world stuffed with strange surprises and delicious food. Robert Hanks met her to chew over matters of life and death - and pastries

In person, Lucy Ellmann appears almost pathologically shy. She speaks quietly, sometimes barely rising above a mumble, her big blue-eyed gaze wanders around the room, her hand hovers in front of her mouth as if trying to conceal some orthodontic catastrophe, though I can't see evidence of one. This diffidence is at odds with her prose manner, which is distinctively loud: exclamation marks! Italics! Words in CAPITAL LETTERS. The capitals, in particular, attract comment and complaint. They do leap from the page, and their exact purpose is often obscure. Her latest novel, Dot in the Universe (Bloomsbury, £14.99), has more than ever:

"What does it matter what we DO or what becomes of us, flesh and bone that moves and thinks for a while and then cuts out? What does it matter what we THOUGHT? Does it even matter if you DIE? A few people will notice and then they'll die too! Life continues around the deathbed itself – people must EAT. Nothing is left of you but a sour voice in your daughter's head every time she loses her keys, or an empty seat on the bus – and there are MORE BRIOCHES for everybody!" Ellmann admits that all the capitals are a problem. She says she picked the habit up from her husband, the American novelist Todd McEwen, but he has it under control, while for her, "It got out of hand. Every word that I would naturally emphasise, I would capitalise – which isn't necessary, apparently. I'm aware of that. But then I couldn't take them out, in the end, it just seemed to take some of the energy out. It has to be angry, it has to have emphasis. Also, some jokes don't work without capital letters."

I think she's right. Take those brioches: if they were lower-case, the joke would simply be about bathos, the sudden descent from death to pastries. Upper-case, there are unsettling suggestions of eating disorder, incipient madness and callous indifference to parental death.

Dot in the Universe is the story of Dorothy "Dot" Butser, a pretty, empty-headed American married to a sexually athletic but faithless Englishman and resident, in the early part of the novel, in the dismal Essex resort of Jaywick Sands. Ellmann lived there herself while studying at Essex University, which accounts for the edge of loathing in her account. Thrown off balance by various life-events, Dot becomes a serial murderer of little old ladies, before leaving John, committing suicide, and then, after a series of adventures in the afterlife, being reincarnated as herself.

Readers of Ellmann's earlier novels will find much that is familiar: the inward-looking protagonist, sexually eager and sexually rejected, struggling to cope with the death of parents; inconsequential lists, signalling the abundance and arbitrariness of existence; the juxtaposition of existential tragedy with trivia and kitsch (Dot collects tea-cosies).

What is new is the extended excursion into fantasy. True, at the end of Man or Mango? most of the characters were abruptly dispatched when an earthquake struck the west of Ireland; but Dot's posthumous existence is a more elaborate affair. (Ellmann's vision of a bureaucratic underworld crowded with grey souls desperate to return to a world of colour bears a resemblance to the afterlife as depicted in Will Self's How the Dead Live – a book she hasn't read.)

One of the striking things about Ellmann's earlier novels was their autobiographical feel. This had less to do with factual coincidences between the lives of her characters and her own (though there was plenty of that) than the intensity of emotion. It's hard to imagine any novelist getting quite so angry about things if she weren't taking them personally. Ellmann admits starting out in autobiographical vein because she wanted to be "authentic": "That, I thought, was hard to do without sticking rather closely to the facts, which actually bores me, now, and embarrasses me, and I would rather make more up, if I could only make up good things." Now, she is learning to invent: "It's fun! But it scares me."

So is it fair to identify her with her protagonists: lonely, melancholic women, consumed with feelings of rejection and self-pity? She jibs at the latter: "It's much more self-hatred." Self-pity, she thinks, is unreadable: "But hatred of myself, and the world, sure. Why hide it...? Not to be terribly disappointed in the world, that would be ... misleading."

I'm curious as to why she finds the world so disappointing – apart from the inevitability of death, which she's clearly pretty teed off about. "Yeah, well, that makes it all unbearable." She ponders: "I think I find virtually every social encounter deeply disappointing, and so disturbing that I'm often crippled with shyness about it, and I just can't function." In this she resembles Eloise, the lovelorn heroine of Man or Mango? who grades social encounters according to necessary recovery time: speaking to postman, half an hour; receiving package and exchanging a few words with postman, one hour; glance from stranger (innocent), 10 minutes; glance from stranger (hostile), 15 minutes. "It's all stemming from some resentment that people aren't ... aren't generous with me enough. That's ancient history, I think, about my parents. But I dread new people doing that to me."

The problem with her parents, both distinguished academics, seems to have been that she didn't live up to their intellectual expectations. From Sweet Desserts, you gather that it was assumed in the Ellmann household that one would embark on a career of teaching and research: "Yeah, it was unspoken but it just seemed obvious: that's what one does. And then it turned out I was terribly bad at it, and I'm still very bad at doing research for novels."

She still has it in for academics: "They make it so tedious – footnotes and bibliographies! They're just ridiculous. Who cares what you read? Just get on with it."

As it happens, Sweet Desserts has the most entertaining pseudo-academic apparatus outside of Nabokov's Pale Fire, with an index that contains such entries as "Aplomb, my total lack of social, 103. And yet, see also my moments of adroitness". And Man or Mango? is very well researched, fleshed out with unexpected extracts from works on natural history and human cruelty. Some reviewers were antagonised: one complained that, with little justification, she borrows thematic substance from reports on the Irish famine and the Holocaust. That misses the point, which is that you don't need justification. Love, death, suffering and madness crowd in on us all the time.

Much as she despises academics, she hates scientists more. Dot in the Universe complains: "What's science done to stop everything going WRONG? Where's science when there's a strange man FARTING IN YOUR BED? Where's science when you're nearing SIXTY, still craving your dead father's approval (though you'd make do with your FATHER-IN-LAW's)?" Isn't science one way of understanding certain stuff? "Irrelevant stuff. Like, the way they behave with animals. How many animals, how many kangaroos – I read this when I was doing research for this about marsupials." In Dot in the Universe, possums play a supporting role. "I had to read through these revolting scientific articles about kangaroos, where they just rounded up about a thousand, cut them all up in order to discover, what? What do we need to know about kangaroos? Why not leave them in peace?"

If you think novels should be big and broad, Ellmann's chronic, almost solipsistic narkiness is a flaw. "That's always moved me about Dickens and other people," she says, "the humanity is great! But I'm not good at it. I have to admit it, I hate most people." In this she includes her protagonists: readers are not expected to identify with them.

Personally, I admire this mad subjectivity, which is if nothing else honest: we are mostly wrapped up in our own little selves. "Well, I think the self is the only thing you can possibly know much about, and you do have to start from that. You can be as grandiose as you like, but if you don't get some sort of handle on one single self, where are you coming from?" That seems reasonable. And, in the end, her novels are funny and original and sometimes, out of the blue, moving. Isn't that ambition enough?

Biography

Lucy Ellmann was born in 1956, in Evanston, Illinois, second daughter of Richard Ellmann – the author of the definitive biographies of Yeats, Joyce and Wilde – and the feminist critic Mary Ellmann. Her father subsequently took up teaching appointments at Yale and, when Lucy was 13, Oxford. She has lived in Britain ever since, although she complains bitterly about the awfulness of the place and retains an American accent. She attended art schools in Falmouth and Canterbury, followed by Essex University and the Courtauld Institute. She has one daughter, born in 1983, the fruit of a short-lived marriage. Her first novel, the heavily autobiographical Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1988. Her other novels are Varying Degrees of Hopelessness (1991), Man or Mango? A Lament (1998) and Dot in the Universe (which is published next week by Bloomsbury). Lucy Ellmann lives in Edinburgh with her second husband, the novelist Todd McEwen.