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Summary
Summary
Animals and celebrities share unusual relationships in these hilarious satirical stories by an award-winning contemporary writer.
Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants--all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture in a wildly inventive collection of stories that "evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits" ( Publishers Weekly , Starred Review).
While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millet's ruthlessly lucid prose. Implacable in their actions, the animals in Millet's spiraling fictional riffs and flounces show up their humans as bloated with foolishness yet curiously vulnerable, as in a tour-de-force, Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. Millet treads newly imaginative territory with these charismatic tales.
"These incredibly crafted stories, with their rare intelligence, humor, and empathy, describe the furious collision of nature and science, man and animal, everyday citizen and celebrity, fact and fiction. Lydia Millet's writing sparkles with urgent brilliance." --Joe Meno
Author Notes
Lydia Millet is the author of Omnivores and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It makes a bizarre kind of sense to pair animals with celebrities, as the PEN-USA Award-winning Millet does in her new collection, since both tend to provoke our sympathy while remaining fundamentally alien. This disconnect proves a fascinating subject for stories where David Hasselhoff's dachshund (which is "not his fault") inspires meditations on mortality, Noam Chomsky holds forth on hamsters, Jimmy Carter spares the swamp rabbit, and Thomas Edison is haunted by the elephant he electrocuted. Millet's apprehension of interspecies rapport is particularly sharp in "Sexing the Pheasant," where Madonna's remorse at shooting a pheasant (while hunting in Prada boots, naturally) is mainly symptomatic of her own self-regard. For sheer line-for-line delight, nothing beats "The Lady and the Dragon," where a Sharon Stone look-alike is lured to the bedside of an Indonesian billionaire who plans to make the movie star his concubine. Millet's stories evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits, not unlike the famous naturalist in "Girl and Giraffe," who watches as lions and giraffes live out the "possibilities of the world" while hiding in the underbrush: "being a primate, he was separate forever." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Animals are dying for our sins. In her first short story collection after six scorching novels, brilliant and audacious Millet archly plucks famous people out of history books and the tabloids and places them at the nucleus of acerbic yet elegiac tales about stark encounters with other species. Here's Madonna, to the manor ascended, trying to be all British by shooting a pheasant. Noam Chomsky tries to interest folks in a plastic gerbil condominium. Millet turns from droll and caustic to haunting and tragic in concise yet psychologically and morally intricate stories about Thomas Edison and Topsy, the elephant he electrocuted, and George Adamson, who, like his wife, Joy, of Born Free-fame, anchored his life to lions and came to a tragic end. The harrowing title piece provides the key as a scientist conducts experiments involving the cruel separation of infant monkeys from their mothers. What Millet is up to in each wrenching parable is contrasting human narcissism and hubris with motherhood and the profound work of caring for the vulnerable, which emerges as a universal expression of the life force one that we, as biosphere-destroying animals, trivialize at our peril.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LYDIA MILLET'S stories uniformly begin with arresting lines, all of them guns on the wall, waiting to go off. "When a bird landed on her foot the pop star was surprised." "The dog was serious, always had been." "I knew a great man once." High stakes, yes, but also the promise of a bit of fun, a promise that this collection rarely forgets. "Love in Infant Monkeys" is Millet's first story collection (after six novels), and it centers on the interactions between celebrities and animals. But of course it's really about plain old humans - life lurks in the civilian underworld, it's clear. We may get David Hasselhoff's dog and his walker, Noam Chomsky and a rodent cage, Thomas Edison and the elephant he filmed being electrocuted, but these setups are often decoys; the narrative mostly belongs to those beneath the headlines. Millet's strengths are on display in "The Lady and the Dragon." To lure Sharon Stone to be his concubine, an Indonesian billionaire has bought the Komodo dragon that attacked her ex-husband. But his staff fails to procure the real Stone and instead hires a Vegas impersonator who freaks out when the lizard disembowels a fawn. Lizard and impersonator eventually escape on the same boat. Pretty ridiculous, yet the story isn't played for laughs. It slowly shifts registers from amused to engaged. Millet starts with a journalistic recounting of the attack (they're mostly too good to check, but all of these stories rely on some factual underpinning - Stone's ex, Phil Bronstein, really was bitten by a Komodo dragon), then continues with a more nuanced view of the situation. In a wonderfully believable detail, the staff member responsible for contacting Stone is too scared to call her management, so he e-mails instead. We end, surprisingly, with the impersonator in a kind of communion with the Komodo dragon. "At once graceful and ugly, humble and pugnacious. She could not explain it to herself, but it was reassuring." Through slow accretion, Millet works a kind of spell: you finish the story thinking about human virtues, not comic traps. There isn't much nature writing in "The Lady and the Dragon," but there's a lot of naturalism. Chekhov's gun analogy is by now too worn, and similarly the observations in some of these stories can feel familiar. "A pigeon might seem serene," Millet writes in "Tesla and Wife," "but that was a trick of the feathers. The feathers were soft, but beneath them it was bloody. That was beauty, said Tesla: the raw veins, the gray-purple meat beneath the down." Yes, we get it - gore and intensity are the stuff of life. But beneath the bravado, the sentiment is commonplace. Millet is better when she's a little softer. "People love their pets," she writes later in the same story, "but the love is tinged with sadness. Because the love is for a pet, they are ashamed of this. They want the love to seem as small as a hobby so no one will have to feel sorry for them." That's more like it. Like many of her best lines, it's almost an aphorism, which is different from a truism. You could read this collection as a critique - of our celebrity culture, of the uses we make of unresponding creatures - and Millet is sufficiently thorough to layer these resonances in a satisfying way. But that would be to miss the pleasures of the best of these stories: their quickness, their minor graces. Millet probably tries on too many guises and occasionally skims when it comes to character, but these are marks of her satisfying restlessness and reach. A story collection too varied to be packaged as a kind of novel is a refreshing thing. As the similarly ambitious Madonna thinks to herself in the first story, "Sexing the Pheasant": "Skin-deep, maybe, but so what? Skin was the biggest organ." In one story, a man hoping to marry Sharon Stone buys the Komodo dragon that attacked her ex-husband. Willing Davidson's work has appeared in Slate and The New Yorker. He lives in Stockholm.
Kirkus Review
Short fiction from risk-taking novelist Millet (How the Dead Dream, 2008, etc.). These ten stories aim to erase the distinction between humans and animals. Humans are mostly represented here by celebrities, and Millet uses several real-life episodes of interspecies interaction as her starting point. She considers, for example, Thomas Edison's electrocution of the elephant Topsy and Jimmy Carter's humiliating encounter with a "killer rabbit." An author who has imagined a trailer-park denizen's quest to win the heart of the 41st president (George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, 2000) is clearly not afraid of high-concept fiction, and Millet has in the past handled potentially ridiculous conceits with mastery and verve. This time out, her use of celebrities never rises above a cute gimmick. The first story, for example, is a monologue that takes place inside Madonna's head after she shoots but fails to kill a pheasant on her English estate. The fictional Madge has no internal consistency. This problem runs throughout the collection. Drawing closer to our animal cousins seems to have robbed Millet of her once-prodigious capacity to depictand to sympathize withHomo sapiens. It's probably no coincidence that the collection's most compelling character is a dog walker who has intense regard for his charges and little but contempt for their owners. Noble intent, interesting idea, disappointing execution. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Millet follows her sixth novel (How the Dead Dream) with a collection of stories, some previously published, combining celebrities with animals. In "Sexing the Pheasant," Madonna has not quite killed a pheasant on her Scottish estate and obsesses over her adoptive Englishness, among other things. The titular tale examines Harry Harlow's detached efforts to study his controlled "absence of love" in infant rhesus monkeys. A man at the Wellfleet town dump encounters Noam Chomsky, who is trying to give away his granddaughter's gerbil condo in "Chomsky, Rodents." In perhaps the most surreal and humorous yarn, "Lady and Dragon," an Asian billionaire attempts to win the admiration of actress Sharon Stone by adopting the Komodo dragon who bit her ex-husband. VERDICT Ranging from the mundane to the surreal, Millet's satirical yet sometimes touching stories will appeal to fans of the author's previous novels, especially Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and to fans of T.C. Boyle's fictionalizations of well-known figures.-Cristella Bond, Muncie, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
