Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories

I’ve been hoping to find a contemporary US fiction writer like Lydia Millet -- although I haven’t been looking very hard, I guess. I’ve realized that, almost alone among my bookworm friends, I just don’t read that much contemporary fiction, and I’m not likely to change now. Cervantes said the point of literature was to “please and instruct” equally, and I have to say I’m just not feeling that from my compatriots much these days. But exceptions prove the rule and so (thanks to a goodreads connection!) I stumbled on Lydia Millet. And found, in addition to great prose - which, in spite (or maybe because) of all the MFA polishing, isn’t common - a compatible sensibility, which I realize is a personal thing and has nothing show more to do with whether a piece of fiction is good or not. But that’s what really caught me: Morality without sentimentality. As in none. A sense of humor and a sense of horror that isn’t cheap exploitation in either case. Beckett had it. Graham Greene, at his best. Evelyn Waugh. Fay Weldon. Paul Theroux, at his best. But Millet is unique, as far as I know, in seeing the importance of the animal world, and human isolation from it, as a key lens for understanding our reality. This book, and How the Dead Dream, which I also loved, are all about the loneliness of being human - a self-imposed loneliness because somehow we’ve forgotten that our cousins are all around us.

A lot of contemporary fiction writers get that our reality has become perverse, so they create exotic, twisted, hyped or counterfactual mirrors for it – vampires, dybbuks, time travel, psychosis, sexdrugsandrockandroll (yawn), genre pastiche, mash-up (it’s Kafka meets Worldwide Wrestling!) postmodern wtf word-worlds. Millet’s the only one I’ve found who seems to have realized that there is an intimately close, quotidian, flesh-and-blood world that is still cognitively infinitely far away – and physically disappearing over the horizon now almost at the speed of light – and that is the animal world.

Analogues are scarce but noble: Moby Dick is one, at the macro end. Kafka’s "A Report to the Academy" is another, at the opposite end of the prolixity scale. But she’s doing her own thing, and it works for me. show less

This collection of short stories has a peculiar mix of celebrities and animals. Some border on charming, such as Sexing the Pheasant (Madonna goes pheasant hunting and has a hilarious inner dialogue, complete with congratulating herself for using proper British slang) and The Lady and the Dragon (a Sharon Stone look-a-like is romanced with a Komodo dragon). Others, particularly the title story, Love in Infant Monkeys are disturbing and leave a bad taste in your mouth. So I guess I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. I don’t think I found as much humor in it as the author intended. It certainly was an interesting theme to build a collection around.

Love in Infant Monkeys is a Pulizer Prize shortlisted book of short stories by Lydia Millet. The stories are all very different, yet joined together by the conceit that each story features both an animal and a famous person, with the people ranging from Noam Chomskey (gerbils) and Jimmy Carter (rabbits, of course), to Madonna (pheasants) and a Sharon Stone impersonator (komodo dragons), to Nikola Tesla (pigeons) and Thomas Edison (an elephant). There is an odd, distanced feel to many of the stories, with several being narrated by a third party or presented as a historical report.

The first story in the book, Sexing the Pheasant, was, for me, the weakest of the collection and had me mildly disliking the book for the first half, before show more Millet finally won me over. The title story benefitted the most from the distant narrative style; without it, the story would simply have been too much to bear reading.

I'm left less that impressed with [[Lydia Millet]]'s writing, but when I first picked up this book someone told me that this is her weakest collection, so I'm inclined to try her again. The conceit of having each story be about someone famous and an animal is clever, but not clever enough to power an entire book. A few of the stories, such as Jimmy Carter's Rabbit, Love in Infant Monkeys and the final story in the book were very good. show less

A superbly written, somewhat humorous collection of short fiction , each story inspired by a headline or “fact-based account” of a celebrity and an animal. My favorites, I think, are “Sexing the Pheasant” in which we are given the internal dialog of Madonna after she has shot a pheasant, which is not quite dead yet; “Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit” where Jimmy Carter goes to visit an old school chum - now a psychologist - to apologize for something done when they are children; and “Sir Henry” a tale told by the dogwalker to celebrities’ dogs. Other stories include “Chomsky, Rodents, “ “Telsa and Wife, “ “The Lady and the Dragon” (Sharon Stone and a Komodo Dragon) and more.

It’s pretty clear in these stories that show more between the humans and the animals, the animals are the wiser and more intelligent of the two. show less

A delightful, quirky, funny and smart collection of stories addressing pop cultural icons, animals and political leaders. The downfall: the collection's first story is far and away its strongest, which makes the ordering seem rather uneven. The first story is a must read for all, but short story lovers will enjoy the entire collection.

A few of the stories were quite thought-provoking, but several were unreadable for me - mainly because of some of the cruel actions of humans towards animals. In her best stories, these actions subtly serve to highlight human frailty or weakness. However, in several of the stories, Millet uses the gimmick too obviously and loses the readers willingness to overlook the gruesome in favor of a message.

I must have missed something, because I did not find the stories humorous as other readers have done. In fact, I felt pretty depressed coming away from this collection.

I loved this collection at first, but by the end it was beginning to feel a little samy. The best stories use the celebrity as a secondary character, instead of the main focus. I liked the Tesla story best. I could have totally done without the Sharon Stone story, which was irritating and too long.