Love In Infant Monkeys

Lydia Millet covers a lot of ground in Love In Infant Monkeys. I notice her strongest pieces are the ones where she assumes a detached narrative perspective, such as "The Lady and The Dragon," which takes the perspective of a disinterested reporter (at some point, it does shift to a close third from the perspective of the Sharon Stone impersonator), "Chomsky, Rodents," which exhibits an even greater amount of distance, because it is told from the perspective of K.'s wife, as told by K.'s relation of the narrative, and "Sir Henry," which is narrated from the perspective of the dogwalker. I think the use of these distanced narrators is a good/artful technique because it places the telling narrator in a similar position to a reader, aligning with Millet's observations on celebrity culture. We are always positioned on the outside, looking in, peering, observing (and perhaps we as readers/voyeurs are making more judgments than these narrators). In "The Lady and the Dragon" and many of the stories that focus on scientist characters, such as "Girl and Giraffe" and "Love in Infant Monkeys," the narrator functions as the "objective" reporter relaying the facts to us, which is how many of us relate to (non-domesticated) animals, calling forth this thematic detail, and interrogating our voyeurism.

I think the collection's conceit, as well as its thematic links, qualify it as a (tenuous) short story cycle. It defies what I would typically define as a short story cycle, in that it would need a connecting character/geographic location to make the collection continue to cohere, but many of the details I've listed above could make this qualify as a short story cycle. It could be interpreted either way, though.

This collection, most obviously, makes me think of how I can use/sustain a conceit in my own writing. I probably wouldn't model myself under (blanking on what the correct preposition to use would be in this instance) Millet, though, considering how polarizing she was in our class alone; however, she does offer interesting manners in which to diversify the perspective one can bring to a particular conceit - one can use a conceit, such as celebrity interaction with animals, or tabloid articles, such as Olean Butler does, and use it as a way to say something profound about our relationships and the fragmentary nature of life/existence. Perhaps this is precisely why conceits like these work for the form of a short story cycle: we require the fragmentary and seemingly random to discover anew profound insights in a postmodern age.