High Praise for a Novel About an Awful Children’s Musical

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/francine-prose-mister-monkey.html

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MISTER MONKEYBy Francine Prose285 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

In what presents itself as a modest, mischievous little novel, Francine Prose has, modestly and mischievously, given us a great work. Expertly constructed, “Mister Monkey” is so fresh and new it’s almost giddy, almost impudent with originality. Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy.

At the center of the novel is “an off-off-off-off Broadway production of ‘Mister Monkey,’ the umpteen-hundredth revival of the cheesy but mysteriously durable musical based on the classic children’s novel.” From this unpromising source, Prose spins her moving tale of determined, colorful has-beens, hangers-on and outsiders; those who are too old or too young to be taken seriously; cynics, naïfs and, of course, monkeys. In the middle of an awful performance of the awful play, during a momentary silence, a little boy turns to his grandfather and, meaning to whisper, says, “very loud and clear, ‘Grandpa, are you interested in this?’ ”

“Mister Monkey” is Francine Prose’s answer: Yes. To the great benefit of the reading public, Prose is a prolific literary figure. In addition to novels like “Household Saints,” “Blue Angel” and “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” she’s written three story collections and four young adult novels, and she is a gifted biographer and literary critic, as well as a graceful authority on art and film. But more than just prolific, Prose is interested — in everyone and everything, from Anne Frank to Caravaggio to gluttony. In “Mister Monkey,” she turns her imaginative and generous attention to the ordinary people we ordinarily walk past without a second thought.

As cues and miscues (onstage and off) propel the story forward, Prose deftly passes the narrative perspective from one character to the next. A large, disparate group, from child to grandfather, actor to author to audience member’s kindergarten teacher, they inhabit their own distinct chapters, all connected by the performance of the play that’s been interrupted by the innocently tactless child. It’s an intricate technical accomplishment, even more remarkable because it feels effortless. But the novel’s structure is more than just a clever device; it’s also a buoyant, dynamic expression of the author’s radiant curiosity.

The play within the novel has the blandly lurid plot of a certain period of children’s literature: Mister Monkey is an orphan, his parents killed by poachers. When the researcher who tried to protect him is herself killed by poachers, he’s adopted by her husband and two children in New York. There, in their Upper East Side apartment, he picks pockets at cocktail parties as a parlor trick until he is unjustly accused of really stealing and is put in jail, to be rescued at last by a lawyer named Portia, “one of the little jokes thrown in to keep the parents from poking their eyes out from boredom.”

The rascally chimp is played by Adam, an unhappy 12-year-old gymnast with an unruly erection and a fear of climate change, his costume sewn from a brown chenille bedspread. Adam is a lonely, sullen kid, home-schooled (he and his only friend were kicked out of their private school after setting fire to a trash can) by his sad, earnest stage mother, Giselle, a divorcée who lavishes upon the miserable little musical far more mental vigor than the demoralized director and cast do. Giselle, digging in “the tasseled Tibetan feed sack she uses as a purse,” is so energetically inadequate we even find ourselves sympathizing with her obnoxious son. Adam, meanwhile, is so angry at his ability to see through his mother that we’re filled with sympathy for her too. The characters observe one another and reveal themselves: Entering the subway, “Mom slows everything down, annoying everyone behind her. Adam hates how they glare at the panting, asthmatic old hippie in her Gypsy skirt and scarves, even as some dark secret part of him thinks it serves Mom right. Serves her right for what? Oh, poor Mom, poor Mom. Even Adam blames her for things that aren’t her fault.”

The frailty of Prose’s characters is heartbreaking. “In the hospital,” the grandfather recalls, “his newborn grandson had been swaddled in white, like an injured foot.” The grandfather’s chapter is the heart of the book: a lovely exploration of longing and vulnerability within a very funny satirical take on haute Brooklyn parents “who have forbidden themselves to think or speak about anything beside how to trick their children into eating quinoa.” The grandfather experiences his love for his grandson as a “hopeless yearning. Because the force of the grandfather’s love can never be returned, because the child is who he is, because the grandfather is who he is, and because it would go against the natural order for the child to be as obsessed with him as he is with the child. . . . The grandfather sometimes thinks of the child as his unhappy love affair.”

Prose is sensitive to age: its frustrations for the old, who have attained it; for the children, who yearn for its advantages and power; for all those who see it slipping meaninglessly past. “One day less of her 26th year,” the kindergarten teacher muses as the bell rings, “one precious day of her students’ only childhoods, never to be repeated.”

Sympathy, sharp and painful as a dart, is one of Prose’s most devastating and beautiful weapons. She understands the space between people, how we long to move through it, how we fill it up so that we can’t. No one is spared her satirical eye, but even more revealing is the gentle gaze of empathy she affords every character. This includes even the fictional Mister Monkey: part children’s book hero, part evolutionary reminder of true humanity, part Hindu god. “The quality of mercy is not strained,” says Portia, “not even for a monkey.”

The characters watch one another with the awareness and wary concentration of actors, and the theater references come quickly, easily, the way 19th-century writers tossed off quotations from the Bible. That kindergarten teacher is called Miss Sonya; and the aging actress who plays Portia in a humiliating purple miniskirt and rainbow fright wig recalls her Yale Drama School triumph as Sonya in “Uncle Vanya.” There is also a mysterious letter that quotes a letter from Chekhov to Gorky: “Failures and disappointments make time go by so fast that you fail to notice your real life, and the past when I was so free seems to belong to someone else, not myself.”

Real life, the daily, ordinary present with its roots and possibilities, is Prose’s subject. Time in “Mister Monkey” stretches endlessly in every direction, pulling and threatening and beckoning. Mister Monkey, that evolutionary evidence of our past, is also Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god who can see into the future. Whatever it holds, the message, as one of her characters tells another, is, “Don’t be afraid.”

If the words “jewel” or “gem” weren’t so diminished by indiscriminate use, they might do to describe “Mister Monkey.” It’s gorgeous and bright and fun and multifaceted, carrying within it the geological force of the ages. It’s a book to be treasured. But “jewel” and “gem” have been diminished in a critical context, so let me use another word, which cannot be diminished: Chekhovian. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.