Lydia Millett
On the celebrity news website TMZ, there is a feature called Hollywood Zoo. The stars of pop culture are paired beside animals that they - sometimes startlingly - resemble: Prince and a cockatiel, Amy Winehouse and a braying zebra, Tori Spelling and some make of sub-aquatic bottom-feeder.
It's sort of funny, occasionally cruel (to the ape partnered with George W. Bush as much as the other way round), but it's mostly telling. What is the Hollywood gossip mill if not a zoo, meant to represent and capture the supposed "real lives" of its subjects, but invested only in spectacle and so divorced of any real-world context. We know this, yet willingly look and watch and project onto these distant figures our own hopes, desires, envy and fears.
The relationship we have to animals is equally based in fantasy. As with celebrities, who march across our TV sets all day and night, the access we have to animals, from the family pet to the lion enclosure at the zoo, engenders feelings of intimacy. Yet their inner worlds remain unknowable, and our understanding of the furred and feathered is the same as it is of the rich and famous, essentially fiction filtered through a lens of speculation.
Lydia Millet's new book of stories is an exploration of the interstices of these two worlds, which proves incredibly fertile creative territory. Love in Infant Monkeys is the first short fiction collection of the Toronto-raised, Arizona-based author of six novels, and each of the book's stories involves the relationship between a celebrity (ranging from Sharon Stone to Nikola Tesla) and at least one animal (a Komodo dragon and some pigeons, respectively).
In less capable hands, this premise - famous people and their pets! - might feel trite, but Millet is too good a writer to sink into gimmickry and sensationalism. Even the Hollywood Zoo-style satire one might expect is evident only in the first story, Madonna's stream-of-consciousness ruminations after shooting a pheasant. As an opening piece, the Material Girl's interior monologue - "She should just step on its little head and crunch it. But the boots were Prada"- is entertaining, but leaves one wondering if such ironic ventriloquism can be sustained over an entire book.
Fortunately, the whimsy of Sexing the Pheasant gives way to much more sophisticated, layered treatments, and the rest of the collection, though it still percolates with humour (Rajaputra, the Indonesian billionaire in The Lady and the Dragon, hilariously "[kisses]a laminated picture of Roy Orbison every night before bed") and is haunted by deeply felt emotion. In Chomsky, Rodents, the philosopher desperately attempts to persuade garbage pickers to take his granddaughter's "gerbil condo" home from the dump. The story shifts effortlessly from absurdity to a profoundly moving final image: "There was a heaviness to him now. … Chomsky stood at the railing for a long moment, holding the gerbil cage with his thin arms outstretched. Finally he let go."
Throughout Love in Infant Monkeys, Millet resists the tired postmodern conceit of imbuing the private lives of celebrities with meaning. Nor does she ever resort to anthropomorphic renderings of animals, writing her way into their supposed thoughts and feelings. Instead, her stories present both worlds as impenetrable, though not without resonance. Most of her narrators are outsiders - David Hasselhoff's dog walker, a childhood bully of Jimmy Carter - and their revelations are deeply personal; rather than fostering some new understanding of "the Hoff" or a swamp rabbit that terrorized the boy who would be president, these encounters force Millet's characters - and the reader - to look within.
John Berger has written that animals offer "a mirror to a part [of us]that is otherwise never reflected" (something easily asserted of public figures as well). In one of Millet's strongest stories, Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov, Edison responds to his own film of Topsy the elephant's electrocution by telling the image, "You hold me in your dead eyes." It is the sort of projection that feels true to life, that sudden whiff of mortality inspired by creatures, who, as J.M. Coetzee writes in Lives of Animals, "have only their silence with which to confront us."
Ultimately, what the collection brings into sharpest focus are not the inner workings of famous folks and wild beasts, but much more broadly, and honestly, human experience. These stories ripple with emotion and insight. Lydia Millet is a writer of remarkable intelligence and ability, one whose work, like the celebrities and animals that populate Love in Infant Monkeys, holds a mirror up to the life itself.
As John Berger has called the zoo "a monument to the impossibility of such encounters," so too do these stories exist as testaments to the impossible chasm between human and beast, as well as human and famous, distant human. What these stories reveal, most of all, is that within this space - the space of imagination, of fiction - is where our most remarkable, revelatory and moving experiences occur.
Pasha Malla is the author of two books, a dog person and a big fan of TMZ.