No Love for Infant Monkeys

A famous green movie star once said, “Ogres are like onions.” Shrek was speaking to his belief that fictitious beasts are deep with many layers to go through until you get to the core of their souls.

In the collection of short stories Love in Infant Monkeys, author Lydia Millet (How the Dead Dream) attempts to peel back the protective skin from a variety of celebrities. But unlike the many levels that make up an ogre, Millet imagines her celebrities to be simple, one layered bananas.

The group of stories is based on actual run-ins celebrities have had with animals. By using this device as a jumping off point, Millet sidesteps the process of actually having to develop most of the characters she is writing about. Instead of fleshing out her characters, she uses the reader’s preconceived notions of these celebrities. At the same time the animals play to the reader’s emotions by becoming the characters that evoke sympathy. The celebs play the part of the heel or the butt of the writer’s joke.

Pop singer and world famous egomaniac Madonna stars in the story, “Sexing the Pheasant.” This tale derives from the real life account of Madge importing pheasants, for the purpose of target practice, to her estate in England. Millet conjures up what she thinks would race through the mind of the 51-year-old diva when she shoots one of the birds. Unsurprisingly and unimaginatively the writer envisions Madame M behaving quite snobbishly as she looks down on her husband, her husbands, friends, religion, “faggots,” (12) and “retards.” While Millet’s Madonna is the one who is supposed to believe she’s on top of human hierarchy, it is Millet who comes off as having her nose stuck in the air.

The bright spot of “Pheasants” occurs when Madonna keeps reminding herself to act more British. She says Guy,”was acting out because he was pissed at her. (Self: peevish. Pissed meant drunk here.)” (4) But these asides get pretty annoying too after the sixth or seventh time.

In “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” Millet reimagines the circumstances following Edison’s public killing of an elephant. In reality, Thomas Edison filmed the electrocution of a killer circus elephant using rival inventor Nikola Tesla’s alternate current electricity to demonstrate its lethal potential compared to Edison’s safer direct current electricity. In Millet’s fictional world, Edison becomes obsessed with the footage. He begins to talk to the onscreen elephant, is haunted by and driven to the edge of sanity by the memory of the murdered pachyderm.

The story is told through found letters of Edison’s dismissed manservant I. Vasil Golakov. Golakov witnesses Edison’s ravings and then is no longer seen at Edison’s lab shortly after his discovery. This imagined scene of speculation is assembled awkwardly and in the end Millet pulls back the veil to reveal one of America’s greatest inventors is only something slightly more than a kook.

The high point of Infant Love in Monkeys is “Sir Henry.” In this sweet story a professional dog walker who loves the animals but refuses to own one, is asked by one of his clients to take in a dog he walks regularly. After some internal debate, the dog walker declines. But once his decision is made, he realizes that while he owns no pets, at the end of his day he takes every dog he’s ever walked and loved home with him inside his heart.

David Hasselhoff makes a cameo appearance in “Sir Henry” after being crowbarred into the story to make Millet’s celebrity quota.

“’Yeah. Yeah,” said Daivd Hasselhoff on the phone. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” As he winked at the dogwalker, then swooped down, not stopping, to chuck Sir Henry on the chin. “Hey there little buddy.’” (49) And then as quickly as he came in, The Hoff vanishes from the story. Even in his diminutive role, Hassehoff is still portrayed as oafish.

The common theme shared amongst the celebs chosen by Millet is that they are past their prime and lacking in any real relevance today. Even Madonna, who is still an icon, hasn’t been pertinent musically in a decade. Millet misses a real opportunity to let her imagination run wild in this uneven collection. The celebrity plus animal equation is a cute gimmick but it ends up missing it’s potential.

Millet wants to tear back the layers of celebrity to expose an imagined truth, whatever it may be. However, instead of revealing something new and meaningful, Millet only manages to slip on her own banana peel.