“Mister Monkey” by Francine Prose

Mister Monkey: A Novel

By Francine Prose

2016

309 pages / 9 hours and 16 minutes

Fiction

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The term literary fiction has become fashionable in book talk these days, although exactly what it means is never entirely clear. Literary fiction is an attempt to distinguish those serious books from genre fiction like thrillers, mysteries, romance, or sci-fi. This is a little bit unfair to all the authors involved. But there are those authors who write a book every six months that inevitably lands on the bestseller list ... and then there are those other writers. Elizabeth Prose is one of those other writers. With a last name like Prose, you’d better be able to write. No worries; she can.

She is a writer’s writer, and she has received her fair share of recognition for her continuously excellent output. But it would not surprise me if most of the readers of this blog have never even heard of her. Well, it’s high time.

She has written 21 works of fiction and nonfiction as well, so she’s definitely not one of those “once every 10 years” writers. She’s been nominated for the National Book Award and has been a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College.

My first acquaintance with her writing was A Changed Man (2005). The changed man from the title is a young neo-Nazi who wants to radically change his life. The book is brilliant, darkly comic, and quite moving.

All of these things could also be said about Mister Monkey, the book I want to review today. It’s a comedy (I think) but also very moving. The broad outline of the plot is actually very easily summarized: Mister Monkey is an absolutely awful children’s musical about a pet chimpanzee who has a penchant for theft. This terrible play is performed by a cast of very broken people. There you have it.

Ah, but don’t forget this is literary fiction. Underneath a book about a terrible play, there is a continuing resonance with a very good play by Anton Chekhov. Prose is a writer with high ambitions. The book cover, in a slightly over the top way (book flaps are always a little hyper), says the book “delves into some of humanity’s most profound mysteries: art, ambition, childhood, aging, and love.” Well, that would be pretty good, right?

I have to give the parental warning here. One of the young actors in the play, who plays the title chimp, is a very unhappy 12-year-old (no jokes about the redundancy of that last phrase) who is in a pretty constant state of sexual excitement. He is also afraid of climate change. There is also a character in the novel who reminds me of Frankenstein’s monster. The characters in this novel are so frail and treated with such respect by the author that you can’t help rooting for them.

So I close with the final words of Cathleen Schine’s review from the New York Times Book Review: “Chekhovian. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.”