Love in Infant Monkeys

Table of Contents

 

 

 

A
Los Angeles Times
and
Globe and Mail
Best Book of the Year

“The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself.”

—
Salon

“Millet's extraordinary leap of a novel warns us that as the splendor and mystery of the natural world is replaced by the human-made, our species faces a lonely and spiritually impoverished future.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

“In her novels, abstract, poetic passages bemoan the fate of humanity alongside goofy, broad-stroked depictions . . . [
How the Dead Dream
] is no exception . . . [it] synthesizes the two styles of Millet's fiction—the harrowing and the madcap—with a new elegance.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“[Millet's] best when she makes startlingly odd events seem wholly real . . . but what's more profound is Millet's understanding of the loneliness and alienation in a world being poisoned to death.”

—
The Washington Post

“Elegantly written and intellectually sophisticated . . . [
How the Dead Dream
is] a frightening and gorgeous vision of human decline.”

—
Utne

“What Millet has managed to do with
How the Dead Dream
and 2005's wonderful atomic fable
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
is to writes fiction that confronts social issues without falling into shrill hectoring or dull didacticism . . . her steady hand and subtle voice are what make them work as well as they do.”

—
The Believer

“[Millet] has pulled off her funniest, most shrewdly thoughtful and touching novel. If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, he would be extremely jealous.”

—
Village Voice

“[An] extremely smart . . . resonant fantasy.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Millet . . . boldly fuses lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-out-ness to achieve a unique energy and perspicacity, the ideal approach to the most confounding reality of our era: the atomic bomb.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

“Lydia Millet is da bomb. Literally . . . Though
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
possesses the nervy irreverence of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, Millet makes the subject matter her own, capturing the essence of these geniuses in a way that can only be described as, well, genius.”

—
Vanity Fair

“Brilliant and fearless . . . Millet takes a headlong run at the subject of nuclear annihilation, weaving together black comedy, science, history, and time travel to produce, against stiff odds, a shattering and beautiful work.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“[A] unique and wide-reaching book . . . Its head soars into philosophical inquiry about love and peace and creative ambition; its heart is planted in the emotional and psychological landscape of its characters and those who have been terrorized by the bomb; and its feet are sunk firmly into the political reality of greed, manipulation, and opportunism.”

—
Bloomsbury Review

“Millet is a ferocious writer with a sense of humor that is as dark as it is funny . . . [She] has written a novel with the intellectual heft of Pynchon and DeLillo—only a lot more fun to read.”

—
Tucson Weekly

“A prodigious feat.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“If there were any justice in the world,
My Happy Life
would become not merely a cult book, devoured by a few astonished readers every year, but an exemplar, ‘This,' we would say, ‘is how to write a novel that is impossible to forget.'”

—
Commercial Appeal

“A heart-rending novel.”

—
Boston Herald

“A nightmare limned in gold.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“A biting critique of the Bush years with all their ghastly bland-ness and deceit.”—
St. Petersburg Times

“The most sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny satire I've read in years.”

—
Denver Rocky Mountain News

“With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations,
Everyone's Pretty
is both prism and truth.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A kaleidoscopic new satire of America's quietly freakish office workers . . . gives voice to a wide variety of life's unbeautiful losers—and makes them sing for us.”

—
Boston Globe

“A biting send-up of vapid Americana wrapped up in a hilarious novel about five desperate Angelenos in search of redemption.”

—
Boldtype

“Juggling an enormous cast of psychos,
Everyone's Pretty
revels in its own religious chaos, the sexually crazed repeatedly clashing with the sexually pure . . . The book impressively teeters on the edge of total inanity, each scene becoming increasingly uncomfortable, then unraveling out of control.”

—
Village Voice

“Absolutely captivating . . . I picked it up, read it almost in one day—and I was pissed when I had to stop.
Everyone's Pretty
is fast & furious reading that nearly hypnotizes.”

—
Sex Kitten

“
Everyone's Pretty
is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it's like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment over-run with too-clever postmodernists.”

—
Tucson Weekly

Also by Lydia Millet

WHEN A BIRD LANDED on her foot the pop star was surprised. She had shot it, certainly, with her gun. Then it fell from the sky. But she had not expected the actual death thing. Its beak spurted blood. She'd never really noticed birds. Though one reviewer had compared her to a screeching harpy. That was back when she was starting. What an innocent child she was then. She'd actually gone and looked it up at the library. “One of several loathsome, voracious monsters. They have the head of a woman and the wings and claws of a bird.”

She did not appreciate the term
pop star
. She had told this to Larry King. She preferred
performance artist
. She was high art and low commodity, and ironic about how perfectly the two fit. A blind man could see her irony.
She was postmodern, if you wanted to know, pastiche. She embodied.

What, exactly?

If you had to ask, you just didn't get it.

The bird feebly flapped and made silent beak-openings. Where the hell was Guy when she needed him? The London tabloids still called him Mr. Madonna, even though she had tried to make clear on numerous occasions that he wore the testicles in the family. She wanted to yell at them: Giant testicles, OK? Testicles! Huge! (“Large bollocks.” Use frequently.) He was back there somewhere in the trees. Easy to get separated on a thousand acres. She was an English lady now, not to the manor born, but to the manor ascended. So she was the American ideal, which was the self-made person, and the English ideal too, which was snotty aristocrats. Not bad for a girl from Pontiac, Michigan. These days she just said “the Midwest,” which gave it more of a cornfed feeling. Wholesome. In that
Vogue
thing she said Guy was “laddish” and she was “cheeky” and Midwestern. Later she learned “laddish” was pretty much an insult, actually. Well, eff 'em if they couldn't take a joke.

She should step on its little head and crunch it. But the boots were Prada.

Should she shoot it again? No. She couldn't stand to. Sorry. She would just wait for the rest of them; no point being out here all alone anyway. Shouldn't have strutted off all righteous while they stood there drinking. If he wanted to be a frat boy, let him. Her own body was a hallowed temple. His was apparently more of a bordello/ sewer type thing. He was acting out because he was pissed at her. (Self: “peevish.”
Pissed
meant drunk here.) For the shrunken-balls situation. No man wanted puny shriveled ones the size of Bing cherries. Still—not her fault. He had to step up himself. If he felt like the stay-at-home wife to her world-famous superstar, he had serious work to do. On himself. Not on her. She was not the one with the self-esteem issues.