Love in Infant Monkeys

Lydia Millet's "Love in Infant Monkeys" was a strange little short story collection. At first it just seemed sort of bizarre to have each story deal with a celebrity and a different animal. It didn't really make sense to me as I was reading it. However, Millet has this humor that covers up the absurdity of the stories/situations and makes it bearable to read. 

This is definitely the most creative of the cycles we have read. In fact, I wouldn't even call this a cycle. Its more of just a collection. There's no recurring characters, setting or narrator as the other cycles have had. The only connection each story has is a celebrity and an animal. And the celebrities aren't even similar. They range from Jimmy Carter to Madonna, a politician and a popstar. "Love in Infant Monkeys" is so different from a cycle such as "Dubliners" or Winesburg." There's no unifier. Each of these stories obviously is able to stand on its own, but succeeding stories do not give the reader more information on stories previously read. I don't think this collection really fits as a short story cycle. 

My main problem with the collection (which I really didn't like, but not as much as "Self-Help" which was just godawful) was that I just found it stupid. Putting themes and style aside, I felt the idea of pairing a celebrity with an animal and writing a whole short story collection is dumb. It wasn't that creative or innovative or any of the other -tives. At points the stories seemed very forced. The one story that sticks out in my mind is "Sexing the Pheasant" where Madonna goes pheasant hunting with Guy Ritchie and his pub friends. Millet painted such a stereotypical portrait of Madonna. She didn't give her any depth. She just made her like the Madonna one would expect, self-absorbed and pretending to be things she's not (Jewish and British). I would have liked to seen another level of Madonna. Maybe an animal lover or someone who is not totally in love with themselves. At one point Madonna says she wouldnt take a coat from one of her fans because the coat would "suck." Would Madonna really think that? Is she that much of a bitch or does the public just perceive her as one? 

The aspect that I liked in the collection was that the stories would rotate between first-person and third-person. There are some celebrities that I just would not want to hear from in the first person, so it was nice to have an outside narrator telling their story. This is something that I would take from this collection for my own. I don't want every story in my collection to be in first person (or third person). I like the change. You can still have unity in a collection even if there's not the same narrator the whole time.