Sarasota News and Books

What do Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Thomas Edison, ad Madonna have in common? They’re all protagonists (or at least central charactersour sympathy for them is sometimes in question) in Lydia Millet’s wondrous new collection, Love in Infant Monkeys. The title comes from the celebrities’ curious co-stars: a collection of animals ranging from hamster and rabbits to elephants and giraffes.The Pulitzer Committee praised Millet’s book for “underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles.” Millet has never been nominated before, but did win a PEN-USA Award for another novel of human folly: 2002′s My Happy Life. The narrator of this book is an unnamed woman trapped in an abandoned mental asylum, who writes her life story on her prison walls.Millet’s shifts in tone, apparent across her full body of work, are also at hand within Love in Infant Monkeys itself. The grimness of My Happy Life is apparent in a tale of Edison being haunted by a circus elephant he shocked to death, as the story describes him endlessly re-watching his video of the deed. The author has never been one to resist stretching a joke, though, as seen in 2000′s George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, where a trailer-park woman tries to win over the president’s affections. Humor worms its way through all of these short pieces as well, such as the philosophical musings which attend a walk with David Hasselhoff’s dog.Love in Infant Monkeys is published by Soft Skull Press, an independent New York City publisher which has established itself as a hotbed of powerful, impassioned new writing. 2010 was the first year the press received any Pulitzer nominations. In addition to Millet’s book, Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was nominated for Drama.