A review by richardleis
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

5.0

Lydia Millet explores through her shorts stories in the collection Love in Infant Monkeys the harm we cause animals and also the ridiculousness of celebrity. Only one of these stories is outright fantasy; the rest have as their initiating kernel a true story about a person and animals. She crafts from the truth fictions that are both darkly humorous and emotionally wrought. Every story is great and I particularly loved the unexpected transcendence of the animals in "Girl and Giraffe," the unresolved response to the question posed in "Sir Henry," the interweaving dialogues of "Chomsky, Rodents" and the indictment in "Love in Infant Monkeys." The "Walking Bird" that ends the collection is a fairy tale and also a warning about how we treat animals, with a Twilight Zone-like twist that is at once so gentle and easy to miss and also incredibly powerful. The animals in these stories are just as much people as the human characters. They tend to be noble and martyred, but Millet manages to give them more complexity than that, evidence of her level of craft.