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A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
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Judge not, reader
LOVE IN INFANT MONKEYS:
Stories
By Lydia Millett
208 pp. Soft Skull Press $13.95
Reviewed by Maureen Sullivan
The author of six novels, most recently How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet has charted new territory in her first short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys.
Drawing on an eclectic set of celebrities that includes Thomas Edison, Jimmy Carter, Madonna, and Sharon Stone, the stories take a factual nugget from their lives and weave fictional musings around them that are in turn hilarious, taunting, and achingly beautiful.
Each tale reduces the celebrity’s public persona to a level of ordinariness by focusing on a specific, mundane event involving an encounter with an animal. The interaction between animal and human is a foil to examine larger issues of love, cruelty, and death. Whether wild creatures, domestic pets or captives, the animals all ultimately provide insight into the fallibility and faults of the human species.
Some interactions are transient and violent, as in “Sexing the Pheasant,” which places Madonna in the English countryside on a shooting expedition. Here she has time to muse about her own self-importance as she tries to assuage her boredom and complete lack of interest in her human companions, whom she considers beneath her. Madonna’s self-obsession is highlighted, although not through human interaction, but an interior monologue about the dying pheasant she has just shot: “She should step on its little head and crunch it. But the boots were Prada.”
Other encounters are deeply committed and full of love, a sentiment expressed in “Tesla and Wife,” where the main character, once the toast of Time magazine, spends solitary days in his room in the Hotel New Yorker, devoted to his pigeons: “He called the pigeons his friends. ’His most sincere friends,’ as he said.” This pure and devoted love is in stark contrast to the violent relationship that his cleaning lady, who is in love with him, has with her husband.
While each story features a very different type of character and scene, in the end they all employ animals not merely as devices to help crystallize a human’s capacity for love and cruelty, but also to show that the animal kingdom is far superior in its ability to give respect, even in the face of death. “Girl and Giraffe” describes a face-off between Girl, one of the lions made famous in the book Born Free by Joy and George Adamson, and a baby giraffe she has just cornered for supper. Despite exercising her ultimate power in the end, Adamson witnesses an unspoken pact between Girl and her prey that ultimately points to respect: “But he came to believe, over the years that a call and answer had passed between Girl and the giraffe: the foal had asked for and been granted reprieve.”
Millet conveys poignancy through her use of simple, searing language and keen attention to detail. In the title story “Love In Infant Monkeys,” the image she paints of a baby lab monkey who has been taken from its mother to see how it copes without love is unforgettable: “Not a spark animated the creature. Finally given up. Now broken. Her spindly arms hung loose from the sockets, doing nothing. Hunched little figure, staring. Nothing there. It had gone.”
Millet also uses comic relief to create breathing space for the reader. In “Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit,” a man with a drinking problem reveals that his wife’s 12-step meetings “seemed to consist of a gaggle of hausfraus who had fastened like limpets to the notion that every man jack was a substance abuser.”
But for all her virtues as a story-teller, Millet’s collection is disappointing and frustrating because she insists on endings that are too vague and unresolved. If her intention is to leave room for the reader to interpret, then she is unsuccessful. Instead she makes you feel like an expectant lover who, looking for deeper meaning, is then jilted and left wondering whether you read too much into what was only meant to be a bit of fun.
Despite her unsatisfying story endings, Millet’s imaginings linger for their beauty and for the fact that although the human protagonists are often painted harshly, the reader is never allowed to judge, but instead is brought back again and again to the potential of his own shame and human imperfection.
A native of Ireland, Maureen Sullivan is a freelance journalist who has lived in New York since 2005. She earned her degree in Business Studies from Dublin City University but after a decade in the corporate world she decided to follow her passion for writing. She is currently enrolled at the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
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