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Mister Monkey

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Overview

“Tender and artful . . . a gently spiritual celebration of life.” —New York Times Book Review

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose weaves an ingenious, darkly humorous, and brilliantly observant story that follows the exploits and intrigue of a constellation of characters affiliated with an off-off-off-off Broadway children’s musical

Mister Monkey—a screwball children’s musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee—is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime. Margot, who plays the chimp’s lawyer, knows the production is dreadful and bemoans the failure of her acting career. She’s settled into the drudgery of playing a humiliating part—until the day she receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous admirer . . . and later, in the middle of a performance, has a shocking encounter with Adam, the twelve-year-old who plays the title role.

Francine Prose’s effervescent comedy is told from the viewpoints of wildly unreliable, seemingly disparate characters whose lives become deeply connected as the madcap narrative unfolds. There is Adam, whose looming adolescence informs his interpretation of his role; Edward, a young audience member who is candidly unimpressed with the play; Ray, the author of the novel on which the musical is based, who witnesses one of the most awkward first dates in literature; and even the eponymous Mister Monkey, the Monkey God himself.

With her trademark wit and verve, Prose delves into humanity’s most profound mysteries: art, ambition, childhood, aging, and love. Startling and captivating, Mister Monkey is a breathtaking novel from a writer at the height of her craft.

Product Details
About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062397850
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/18/2016
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	628,769
File size:	531 KB

About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

April 1, 1947

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College, 1968

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

Hell, it turns out, is children's theater. That's the distinct impression you get in Francine Prose's Mister Monkey, about an eponymous "off-off-off-off Broadway" children's production and its panoply of warped players. It's always exhilarating when a serious novelist reveals her ridiculous, irreverent streak, when she isn't too self-consciously proper to jape and jeer at the ineptitudes of everyday living. Prose has always been an unafraid novelist with a thirst for the mordant and satirical — her most effective novel, Blue Angel, chastens the illiberal extravagances of the academic Left — and in Mister Monkey she's back to show us how downright batty our world can be.

Modeled on a children's book about a Manhattan family that adopts a pocket-picking chimpanzee, Mister Monkey the musical is, by all accounts, "an outrageously bad play . . . a sweet but basically retarded musical for children." One character describes it as "obvious and preachy, full of improving lessons about race and class, honesty, justice, and some kind of . . . spirituality, for want of a better word." The children's book author wonders "how anybody but a fucking moron could enjoy that fucking idiotic bullshit."

The cast and crew of the musical lurch through a series of mishaps by the misbegotten, going off script, encouraging injury, inciting humiliation. Among the cast there's Margot, a former Yale star who in costume looks like "a slutty executive-secretary birthday clown" and has "a brittle protective screw-you shell encasing a gooey caramel of longing." There's Adam, the barely pubescent child actor playing Mister Monkey — note his insistently symbolic name — who tries to hump Margot onstage: "Adam is darkness, darkness, terror, and rage building toward a volcanic eruption inside a monkey suit." There's Roger, the "sadistic, half-mad" director overseeing this debacle. There's Ray Ortiz, the children's book author, who refers to Mister Monkey as "that little primate son of a bitch," apparently not realizing that he's a primate, too. (In a confusion of taxonomy to drive a primatologist nuts, "chimp" and "monkey" are everywhere employed interchangeably — chimps aren't monkeys.) He's a common imbecile, this children's author: about the butchery of gorillas in the Congo, his contribution is "I hate that shit," as if he were rating salsa.

Prose casts an often shrewd eye over the fine-graded delineations of the New York society her players inhabit. There are chic thirty- something parents who yearn never to be found guilty of "the sin of talking or thinking about anything besides their kids" — Volvo drivers whose pompous daily objective is "to trick their children into eating quinoa." Downtown is "the fascist corporate wasteland otherwise known as Battery Park City." One woman uses a "tasseled Tibetan feed sack" for a purse. The smoke from a halal food truck is "half-crematorial," a child's German immigrant teacher a "Nazi pig asshole."

As you can see, Prose doesn't care whether or not you're bothered by the crass way her people think and speak. The second the satirical novelist begins to worry about the delicate sensibilities of her readers is the second she forfeits her stake in genuine satire. If Prose marshals comedic observations no one would argue with — "Below a certain level of fame, a diva is just a pain in the ass" or: "Fuck with an elephant and he will stomp you flat, no questions asked" — she also knows when to inject a dignified veracity: "There is never a moment when the grandfather has to stop and calculate how long he has outlived his father; he always knows."

But what Prose's publisher calls a "madcap narrative" isn't nearly madcap enough. If you attempt to allay silliness with shafts of sincerity, you'd best take care that the sincerity isn't too aware of the juxtaposition, that it doesn't bloat into sentimentality. When Prose hovers over the stage, detailing the various travesties of the show, she's at her most comically astute. When she exits the theater to chronicle the dutifully unhinged lives of her characters, most of whom come freighted with unnecessarily traumatic back- stories, she trots down avenues of forced earnestness, straining for an emotional gravitas the story doesn't need or want. These pat, frictionless forays into their personal affairs are fusillades of the quotidian, pointlessly exact, as in the tedious date when Ray Ortiz proposes to his girlfriend.

Why didn't Prose rely on the undiluted comedy, let it be its disturbed self without defacing by precious longueurs? The characters are given to maudlin platitudes and clichés: "Each moment of life is a gift" and "The future looks bright" and "Anything could still happen." They think in saccharine metaphor: "Outside I'm a prickly cactus. Inside is the cool refreshing water that will save your life if you are lost in the desert." Prose is undeterred by the effortless banality of their inner realms, and she's undeterred by caricature. In one scene with a priest, she has him trail every sentence with "my son": "Go on, my son" and "Please continue, my son."

Worse, much the novel is too breezily confected, with no linguistic commitment — the loose, nearly automatic language has all the attendant cliché you'd expect: "good as gold" and "heated discussions" and "flirting with disaster" and "a cry for help." In Allan Gurganus's Plays Well with Others and Martin Amis's Money, two other novels that detail the sundry madnesses of Manhattan, the comedy surges as much from the circumstances as from the originality and wit of the language that narrates them. If every novelist has an obligation to say it new, the comic novelist has an extra onus, since staleness of phrase is incompatible with wit.

In one of the best scenes in Mister Monkey, "way beyond off-script," Adam grabs Margot's kicking foot and holds it there in the air before him:
They square off, staring, mongoose-cobra, Margot cork-screwed around and tottering on one high heel, the frayed hem of her purple skirt riding dangerously up her poor little chicken thigh. Adam could break her leg! Does the audience have any idea how rogue and psychotic this is? Do they think that violent assault is acceptable children's musical theater?
Good questions. The shimmering cynics and earnest dupes who populate these pages, players and spectators alike, often seem astounded to find themselves at this present place in their lives — in this theater, this city. "Oh, the sad, sad, sadness of their puny ambitions," Prose writes. How can they have larger, more interesting ambitions? They might start by becoming more interesting people.

William Giraldi is the author of the novel Busy Monsters and a senior editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University.
Reviewer: William Giraldi

The Barnes & Noble Review

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…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…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.

The New York Times Book Review - Cathleen Schine

Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a gently spiritual celebration of life.” — New York Times Book Review, front cover review
“Masterful. . . . a lovely tribute to the transformative value of imagination.” — Washington Post
“An indelible cast of characters… In this strong, humane, and funny novel, Prose has treated us to an enthralling entertainment both on and off stage.” — Boston Globe
“Beautifully crafted, incisively written…Engaging and accessible…What elevates this novel is Prose’s ability to let us see into the heart of each character, to render each so vulnerably human, so achingly real in just a few short paragraphs.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“In this novel, the imminent end of the world feels as inevitable as the end of a particular life. MISTER MONKEY itself, though, is gripping and engaging all the way through, the characters’ miseries as moving as their fierce attachments to hope and the possibility of unexpected mercies.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Remarkable. . . . [Prose] is the Meryl Streep of literary fiction, convincingly shifting between multiple voices and points of view-not just from book to book, but within a single work.” — NPR
“(a) madcap, razor-sharp comedy.” — People
“A comedy of manners for the digital age… an astonishing tour de force.” — Brooklyn Eagle
“Prose is at her consummate, canny best in this superbly incisive comedy of errors, a cleverly choreographed relay in which each character subtly passes the narrating baton on to the next, and what a beguiling and bedeviled cast this is! ... Each character’s inner soliloquy is saturated with yearning and profound spiritual inquiries as the silly play covertly evokes questions about truth and lies, evolution and extinction, and how we care for each other and the world. Prose is resplendent in this exceptionally keen, artistic, funny, empathic, and intricate dance of longing and coincidence.” — Booklist, starred review
“Prose hilariously nails the down-at-the-heels milieu while also evoking the magic even low-rent theater can inspire in the narratives of the show’s costume designer (an underpaid NYU grad student), the moonlighting emergency room nurse who plays the villainess, and the director, whose closing monologue reveals someone much kinder than his prior treatment of Margot suggested. Wickedly funny and sharply observant, in the author’s vintage manner, with a warmth that softens the satire just enough.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“This novel promises to be madcap and profound in equal measure.” — The Millions
“A medley of hilarity, complexity and ruefulness, the novel is stellar, a showcase for an author whose juggling is a marvel to behold.” — Maclean's Magazine (Canada)
“It’s always exhilarating when a serious novelist reveals her ridiculous, irreverent streak, when she isn’t too self-consciously proper to jape and jeer at the ineptitudes of everyday living. Prose has always been an unafraid novelist with a thirst for the mordant and satirical.” — barnesandnoble.com
“Prose deftly manages the delicate balance of the comic novel, presenting humor and absurdity without sacrificing the humanity of her characters…A fairly breezy read with hidden, and not so hidden, depths.” — Library Journal
“How does Prose do it? With precision, intelligence and wicked jocularity. She measures art in monkeys. She demands an evolution. This book hilariously swings through a backstage rank with hormones, ambition and an unforgettable cast of characters. Prose’s words entice and excite like a darkened theater where the show is just about to begin.” — Samantha Hunt, author of MR. SPLITFOOT
“Francine Prose has made something so original with Mister Monkey, her dizzying Ferris wheel of a novel, that it boggles the lucky reader’s mind. Besides making me laugh out loud, its earned warmth & yes its effortless insight into the madness of the human heart creates pure delight. Francine Prose’s best novel.” — John Guare, distinguished playwright and author of "The House of Blue Leaves," "Six Degrees of Separation," and "Landscape of the Body"

From the Publisher

Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a gently spiritual celebration of life.

New York Times Book Review

A comedy of manners for the digital age… an astonishing tour de force.

Brooklyn Eagle

Masterful. . . . a lovely tribute to the transformative value of imagination.

Washington Post

Prose is at her consummate, canny best in this superbly incisive comedy of errors, a cleverly choreographed relay in which each character subtly passes the narrating baton on to the next, and what a beguiling and bedeviled cast this is! ... Each character’s inner soliloquy is saturated with yearning and profound spiritual inquiries as the silly play covertly evokes questions about truth and lies, evolution and extinction, and how we care for each other and the world. Prose is resplendent in this exceptionally keen, artistic, funny, empathic, and intricate dance of longing and coincidence.

starred review Booklist

An indelible cast of characters… In this strong, humane, and funny novel, Prose has treated us to an enthralling entertainment both on and off stage.

Boston Globe

(a) madcap, razor-sharp comedy.

People

Beautifully crafted, incisively written…Engaging and accessible…What elevates this novel is Prose’s ability to let us see into the heart of each character, to render each so vulnerably human, so achingly real in just a few short paragraphs.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Remarkable. . . . [Prose] is the Meryl Streep of literary fiction, convincingly shifting between multiple voices and points of view-not just from book to book, but within a single work.

NPR

In this novel, the imminent end of the world feels as inevitable as the end of a particular life. MISTER MONKEY itself, though, is gripping and engaging all the way through, the characters’ miseries as moving as their fierce attachments to hope and the possibility of unexpected mercies.

San Francisco Chronicle

A medley of hilarity, complexity and ruefulness, the novel is stellar, a showcase for an author whose juggling is a marvel to behold.

Maclean's Magazine (Canada)

How does Prose do it? With precision, intelligence and wicked jocularity. She measures art in monkeys. She demands an evolution. This book hilariously swings through a backstage rank with hormones, ambition and an unforgettable cast of characters. Prose’s words entice and excite like a darkened theater where the show is just about to begin.

Samantha Hunt

This novel promises to be madcap and profound in equal measure.

The Millions

Francine Prose has made something so original with Mister Monkey, her dizzying Ferris wheel of a novel, that it boggles the lucky reader’s mind. Besides making me laugh out loud, its earned warmth & yes its effortless insight into the madness of the human heart creates pure delight. Francine Prose’s best novel.

John Guare

It’s always exhilarating when a serious novelist reveals her ridiculous, irreverent streak, when she isn’t too self-consciously proper to jape and jeer at the ineptitudes of everyday living. Prose has always been an unafraid novelist with a thirst for the mordant and satirical.

barnesandnoble.com