Drawing closer to our animal cousins seems to have robbed Millet of her once-prodigious capacity to depict-and to sympathize with-Homo sapiens. This problem runs throughout the collection. The fictional Madge has no internal consistency. The first story, for example, is a monologue that takes place inside Madonna’s head after she shoots but fails to kill a pheasant on her English estate. This time out, her use of celebrities never rises above a cute gimmick. She considers, for example, Thomas Edison’s electrocution of the elephant Topsy and Jimmy Carter’s humiliating encounter with a “killer rabbit.” An author who has imagined a trailer-park denizen’s quest to win the heart of the 41st president ( George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, 2000) is clearly not afraid of high-concept fiction, and Millet has in the past handled potentially ridiculous conceits with mastery and verve. Humans are mostly represented here by celebrities, and Millet uses several real-life episodes of interspecies interaction as her starting point.
These ten stories aim to erase the distinction between humans and animals. Millet treads newly imaginative territory with these charismatic tales.Short fiction from risk-taking novelist Millet ( How the Dead Dream, 2008, etc.).
Implacable in their actions, the animals in Millet’s spiraling fictional riffs and flounces show up their humans as bloated with foolishness yet curiously vulnerable, as in a tour-de-force, Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millet's ruthlessly lucid prose. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture in wildly inventive stories that “evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants?all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff.
0 kommentar(er)
