Animal Magnetism

A book review by WILLING DAVIDSON

Lydia Millet’s stories uniformly begin with arresting lines, all of them guns on the wall, waiting to go off. “When a bird landed on her foot the pop star was surprised.” “The dog was serious, always had been.” “I knew a great man once.” High stakes, yes, but also the promise of a bit of fun, a promise that this collection rarely forgets.

“Love in Infant Monkeys” is Millet’s first story collection (after six novels), and it centers on the interactions between celebrities and animals. But of course it’s really about plain old humans — life lurks in the civilian underworld, it’s clear. We may get David Hasselhoff’s dog and his walker, Noam Chomsky and a rodent cage, Thomas Edison and the elephant he filmed being electrocuted, but these setups are often decoys; the narrative mostly belongs to those beneath the headlines.

Millet’s strengths are on display in “The Lady and the Dragon.” To lure Sharon Stone to be his concubine, an Indonesian billionaire has bought the Komodo dragon that attacked her ex-husband. But his staff fails to procure the real Stone and instead hires a Vegas impersonator who freaks out when the lizard disembowels a fawn. Lizard and impersonator eventually escape on the same boat.

Pretty ridiculous, yet the story isn’t played for laughs. It slowly shifts registers from amused to engaged. Millet starts with a journalistic recounting of the attack (they’re mostly too good to check, but all of these stories rely on some factual underpinning — Stone’s ex, Phil Bronstein, really was bitten by a Komodo dragon), then continues with a more nuanced view of the situation. In a wonderfully believable detail, the staff member responsible for contacting Stone is too scared to call her management, so he e-mails instead. We end, surprisingly, with the impersonator in a kind of communion with the Komodo dragon. “At once graceful and ugly, humble and pugnacious. She could not explain it to herself, but it was reassuring.” Through slow accretion, Millet works a kind of spell: you finish the story thinking about human virtues, not comic traps. There isn’t much nature writing in “The Lady and the Dragon,” but there’s a lot of naturalism.

Chekhov’s gun analogy is by now too worn, and similarly the observations in some of these stories can feel familiar. “A pigeon might seem serene,” Millet writes in “Tesla and Wife,” “but that was a trick of the feathers. The feathers were soft, but beneath them it was bloody. That was beauty, said Tesla: the raw veins, the gray-purple meat beneath the down.” Yes, we get it — gore and intensity are the stuff of life. But beneath the bravado, the sentiment is commonplace.

Millet is better when she’s a little softer. “People love their pets,” she writes later in the same story, “but the love is tinged with sadness. Because the love is for a pet, they are ashamed of this. They want the love to seem as small as a hobby so no one will have to feel sorry for them.” That’s more like it. Like many of her best lines, it’s almost an aphorism, which is different from a truism.

You could read this collection as a critique — of our celebrity culture, of the uses we make of unresponding creatures — and Millet is sufficiently thorough to layer these resonances in a satisfying way. But that would be to miss the pleasures of the best of these stories: their quickness, their minor graces.

Millet probably tries on too many guises and occasionally skims when it comes to character, but these are marks of her satisfying restlessness and reach. A story collection too varied to be packaged as a kind of novel is a refreshing thing. As the similarly ambitious Madonna thinks to herself in the first story, “Sexing the Pheasant”: “Skin-deep, maybe, but so what? Skin was the biggest organ.”

Willing Davidson’s work has appeared in Slate and The New Yorker. He lives in Stockholm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Davidson-t.html?ref=books