by Lydia Millet
2009, Soft Skull Press
This past summer some of my colleagues suggested to me that we begin an informal book club. The responsibility to select a book fell to me and, panicked, I scrambled around my mental inventory of books I'd like to get around to reading. Perhaps arbitrarily, the title I pulled out was Love in Infant Monkeys, a collection of short stories I read about in the Boston Globe and was subsequently reminded of when it was nominated for last year's Pulitzer Prize.
We never wound up meeting, adding another notch to my aborted book club belt. However, when I arrived this week for professional development at school, I was quickly accosted by one of the would-be members, who simply frowned at me and stared for a very long time to communicate her dislike like of this book.
I assured her the feeling was shared.
Love in Infant Monkeys is a collection loosely united under the premise that each story involves an unlikely combination of a celebrity and an animal - an elephant and Thomas Edison, for example, or David Hasselhoff and a dog.The collection begins jarringly with "Sexing the Pheasant", a scathing story narrated from Madonna's point of view as she is abandoned by a hunting party in England. Millet portrays Madge with no small amount of vitriol:
The fans worshipped you because they needed something - well, what were you supposed to do? Well, prostrate yourself before the Infinite. Clearly.
OK, granted, sometimes the mirror suggested it: Not your fault if your reflection reminded you of all that was sacred, all that was divine and holy...She was actually very humble. And of, course, it was not wrong to see God in yourself.
As Madonna waits for her husband and his chums to show up, she coaches herself on accurate British slang ("...even exceptional brilliance ('brill' - use in moderation)") and attempts to determine the gender of the pheasant she has just shot dead.
Millet's tone in this story sets an uncomfortable tone for the book as a whole. Madonna's frustration and discomfort at having murdered the bird at her feet is the extent of Millet's empathy for her imagined portrait of the superstar. Her attitude towards her subject is caustic and condescending and while several of the subsequent stories are considerably less brutal, her motives in addressing the culture of celebrity seem thereafter a bit suspect.
At first, the conceit of taking these partially factually-based combinations of man and animal is exciting, fresh, irreverent. But the further these stories plunge into variations on the same theme (man's callousness towards the plight of noble animals, man's awareness of his shortcomings and failure to ameliorate his plight) the more the gimmick that initially drew me to this collection felt like just that - a gimmick.
As the collection progresses, these revelations about humanity's self-obsession in contrast with nature's quiet, abused dignity start to seem a bit too simplistic. The idea that man is preoccupied and nature is at best ambivalent to man's ontological struggles and, at worst, harmed by them is not in and of itself a bad idea.
Millet's subjects prove to be too broad as targets. Madonna proves to be too easy to ridicule considering her fetishized status in the echelon of celebrity. Hasselhoff appears as nothing more than a punchline in an otherwise middling story about dog walking; the punchline is his mere existence and Millet uses the narrator, his dog, to punctuate the joke by easily and dishonestly depicting the dog's obliviousness to his owner's status.
Even less obvious targets, like Noam Chomsky (who appears in a story in which he quibbles with his wife at a public dump while trying to give away a hamster condo) or Nicola Tesla (who is shown obsessing with religious-like devotion over carrier pigeons), are treated with a considerable lack of empathy.
It is this absence of empathy for her human characters and the surplus of empathy for the animals that serve them that mars these stories. It is all well and good to establish a clear dichotomy between man's selfishness and the otherwise unobtrusive natural world (although, as mentioned above, this theme seems strikingly one-noted) but Millet erects her characters as straw men, conjecturing to libelous lengths about their apathy towards the world around them.
While I understand that this in and of itself appears to Millet's focus - that as a culture, we revere arbitrarily chosen personalities and cast aside those creatures with no discernible talent beyond being tasty - this does not negate the application of the straw man fallacy. And while Love with Infant Monkeys is not a philosophical thesis and should be subject to logical fallacies, an author must not use her characters as manipulatives in a moralistic puppet show.
I suppose, as was the case in my entry on Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming, my hatred would not be so focused were it not for a sole story whose excellence lays bare the failure of the collection as a whole to live up to the potential hinted at by glints of undeniable talent.
In this case, the story in question is the penultimate piece in the collection, "The Lady and the Dragon". The plot of this particular piece concerns a komodo dragon who bit Sharon Stone's husband on the foot. An eccentric millionaire in Indonesia acquires the dragon and insists to his staff that they convince Sharon Stone to visit.
Soon enough, a woman arrives at the compound, but she is not in fact Stone but a Vegas-style celebrity impersonator. Paid for her time, she pretends to be charmed by the millionaire although is unable to disguise her horror at the dragon's predatory behavior (mirrored, obviously in her host himself). When she is proposed to, she desperately seeks the help of his staff, who successfully secure her voyage home.
This story is much more at peace with the kindness of its characters than the others are, perhaps because its titular character is not, in fact, a celebrity but a celebrity-by-proxy. Where one might have assumed that Millet would portray this woman in a negative light, as a leech on the culture of celebrity, she instead becomes similar in disposition and predicament to the animals who appear in earlier stories: injured by celebrity, duped into thinking there is solace in success.
The portrayal of celebrity in this story certainly fits into the larger themes of the book, but its characters are treated with the tenderness that was virtually absent in say, the Madonna story.
The cover of this book depicts a banana against a black background, bringing to mind Warhol's 
famous cover art for The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its iconic unpeeled (perhaps bruised?) banana. The jacket for this book seems to reference Warhol's attention to fame, to the glorification of celebrity and its peeled banana (while obviously appropriate in terms of monkeys) puns about on this notion of fame debunked as opposed to, in Warhol's work, fame mystified.
What strikes me, though, is that so much of Warhol's work was about the staid aspect of celebrity, the emptiness of iconography. In the very act of creating and glorifying celebrity, Warhol was making a gesture to the arbitrary nature of fame, to the intrinsic absence of intimacy implied in fame. It is this absence of intimacy, of knowability, of true knowledge of the soul of celebrities and non-celebrities alike that afflicts this mess of a work.
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