Literary Magic meets E! True Hollywood Story
Lydia Millet delivers the celebrity goods with Love in Infant Monkeys
By Kelly Skinner
Published: July 24th, 2009 | 12:00am
Love in Infant Monkeys is the most thought provoking short story collection since Judy Budnitz’s Flying Leap (if you haven’t read it, read it!). In seamless prose beset with wit and an overzealous imagination, Lydia Millet has turned out a collection of great wonder and sadness.
In this land of famous people and the animals they have been associated with, Millet weaves characters’ inner monologues into something both beautiful and disturbing.
Madonna struggles with identity, fame, and speaking British in the introductory story, “Sexing the Pheasant,” which is both hilarious and sad in its foray into the mind of a pop-goddess: "Guy looked good with his 12-bore. He was a nature boy. It was sexy on him, esp. with the faux-Cockney stylings. (“Mockney.” Use in moderation). Basically if a man had a gun it was like a double cock."
What we don’t know when we open this fun, harmless looking book flap (it’s got a banana on the cover for Pete’s sake) is just how much we don‘t know. Not only about celebrities, or animals, but about what their lives could be.
As I was reading, I felt constantly intrigued and filled with the desire to Google each person in the book. Did Tesla really obsess over pigeons? Did Thomas Edison kill an elephant or have a servant named Vasil Golakov? It had me thinking: how much of this is life and how much of it is fantasy? Quite an interesting dynamic in the often one-dimensional accounts we have of the rich and famous.
And while there is the occasional jab or foray into comedy, this is actually a very sad, wild-eyed, book of truth. Every story has people trapped in one way or another. If it is isn’t in the actions of their past or present, it is within the unyielding barrier of their own souls.
The show stoppers are most definitely, “Girl and Giraffe” and “Tesla and Wife.” While all the stories have substantial depth and charm, these are the ones with the real chutzpah. In these, the animals and the situations in which they are placed hit a nerve much more damaging than any of the rest. There is something more real about this and much more personal. For me, this is literary magic at its finest.
At times, a few of the other stories do tend to lose a bit of their luster with too subtle endings that simply drop off into nothingness. We are left with too many questions and too many loose ends to satisfy our burgeoning curiosity.
For the most part however, it is a fulfilling book of celebrity fairy tales; a transformative look into the lives of others and into ourselves.
About the book:
Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories
Soft Skull Press; October 2009
192 pages
$13.95
Issue #44
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