title: Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories
author:  Lydia Millet 
description: Starred Review. It makes a bizarre kind of sense to pair animals with celebrities, as the PEN-USA Awardwinning Millet does in her new collection, since both tend to provoke our sympathy while remaining fundamentally alien. This disconnect proves a fascinating subject for stories where David Hasselhoff's dachshund (which is not his fault) inspires meditations on mortality, Noam Chomsky holds forth on hamsters, Jimmy Carter spares the swamp rabbit, and Thomas Edison is haunted by the elephant he electrocuted. Millet's apprehension of interspecies rapport is particularly sharp in Sexing the Pheasant, where Madonna's remorse at shooting a pheasant (while hunting in Prada boots, naturally) is mainly symptomatic of her own self-regard. For sheer line-for-line delight, nothing beats The Lady and the Dragon, where a Sharon Stone look-alike is lured to the bedside of an Indonesian billionaire who plans to make the movie star his concubine. Millet's stories evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits, not unlike the famous naturalist in Girl and Giraffe, who watches as lions and giraffes live out the possibilities of the world while hiding in the underbrush: being a primate, he was separate forever. <i>(Oct.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET
  
  
  Ghost Lights
  
  
  Love in Infant Monkeys
  
  
  How the Dead Dream
  
  
  Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
  
  
  Everyone’s Pretty
  
  
  My Happy Life
  
  
  George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
  
  
  Omnivores
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  
  [Begin reading.](part0005.html#x1)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The author thanks Maria Massie, Tom Mayer, Jess Purcell, Ryan Harrington,
  Denise Scarfi, Amy Robbins, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Tara Powers, Louise
  Mattarelliano, Steve Colca, Ingsu Liu, David High, Bill Rusin, Dan
  Christiaens, and David Goldberg for all that they have done.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  1
  
  
  It was a stricken love, but still love. It was the kind of love that gazed up
  at you from the bare white flood of your headlights—a wide-eyed love with the
  meekness of grass-eaters. Soft fur, pink tongue, and if you got too close a
  whiff of mulch on the breath. This was the love she cherished for her husband.
  
  
  The love had other moments. Of course it did. But its everyday form was
  vegetarian.
  
  
  She 