Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

Overview

"Stark and compelling . . . Rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion: possibly the best work yet from an always stimulating writer."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Katharine Weber’s Still Life With Monkey is a beautifully wrought paean of praise for the ordinary pleasures taken for granted by the able-bodied. In precise and often luminous prose, with intelligence and tenderness, Weber’s latest novel examines the question of what makes a life worth living."—Washington Post

"[A] deeply but delicately penetrating novel."—New York Times Book Review

"Weber’s unsentimental and poignant examination of what does and does not make life worth living is a heartbreaking triumph."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart."—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become “a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.”

Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey—a tufted capuchin named Ottoline—to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough?

Katharine Weber is a masterful observer of humanity, and Still Life with Monkey, full of tenderness and melancholy, explores the conflict between the will to live and the desire to die.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781589881297
Publisher:	Dry, Paul Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/21/2018
Pages:	275
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Katharine Weber is the author of five acclaimed novels—True Confections, Triangle, The Little Women, The Music Lesson, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear—and a memoir, The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities. Objects in Mirror, The Music Lesson, and The Little Women were all named Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review; two of her novels were long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Music Lesson has been published in twelve languages. Katharine holds the Thomas Chair in creative writing at Kenyon College.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] deeply but delicately penetrating novel…Weber's prose is precise, revealing rather than evocative; she seems to be aiming not to show her characters in their best light but rather to illuminate them from all angles, even the least flattering. Befitting the novel's emphasis on the aesthetic, her style here is painterly…Still Life With Monkey is profoundly humane even while it's asking the most difficult questions.

The New York Times Book Review - Lucy Scholes

★ 09/24/2018
Weber’s brilliant novel (following The Memory of All That) follows married couple Duncan and Laura Wheeler as their lives are altered after a car accident—with Duncan at the wheel—leaves him a paraplegic and results in the death of his architect protégé. Laura, an art conservator, painstakingly analyzes cracked ceramic antiques and makes damaged classic paintings whole, and now has to contend with a husband who has lost his verve and motivation. Duncan’s identical twin, Gordon, has lived with various limitations all his life—he is mentally slow and has speech impediments—and Duncan has been his caretaker from afar, always making sure he eats, gets washed, and keeps his job at a bookstore. Now Gordon is the one who cares for Duncan, checking in on him to make sure he’s doing all right. When Laura learns about trained, dexterous capuchin monkeys who assist paralyzed people, she arranges for one to be brought to their home. As the comical creature touchingly becomes part of the family against the backdrop of Laura’s determined optimism and Duncan’s depression and humiliation over being forever dependent, the author explores questions about quality of life, the drive to be productive, and sacrifices born from a depth of love. Weber’s unsentimental and poignant examination of what does and does not make life worth living is a heartbreaking triumph. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Stark and compelling . . . Rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion: possibly the best work yet from an always stimulating writer.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Weber’s unsentimental and poignant examination of what does and does not make life worth living is a heartbreaking triumph."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Katharine Weber’s Still Life With Monkey is a beautifully wrought paean of praise for the ordinary pleasures taken for granted by the able-bodied. In precise and often luminous prose, with intelligence and tenderness, Weber’s latest novel examines the question of what makes a life worth living."—Washington Post

"Weber’s prose is precise, revealing rather than evocative; she seems to be aiming not to show her characters in their best light but rather to illuminate them from all angles, even the least flattering. Befitting the novel’s emphasis on the aesthetic, her style here is painterly: As in Oudry’s composition, attention to detailed realism is everything. Still Life With Monkey is profoundly humane even while it’s asking the most difficult questions.—New York Times Book Review

"Weber's sixth novel is a nuanced investigation of what is left when all of the ways one identifies oneself are wiped out in an instant . . . Beautiful, emotionally resonant storytelling."—Booklist

"The 'still life' in Katharine Weber’s new novel is Duncan Wheeler, a 37-year-old successful Connecticut-based architect who receives life’s worst surprise when a car crash leaves him mostly paralyzed with a C6 spinal cord injury . . . Weber expertly weaves Duncan’s internal conflict throughout the novel, constantly making the reader wonder if he will find the strength to continue living in his new circumstances and carry on with a will to make new legacies. Most importantly, Still Life with Monkey begs the question, 'What would I do in this situation?' It’s a question that lingers long after the book ends."—BookPage

"For Weber fans, this new novel is a cause for celebration and is likely to win her many more admirers."—Amazon's Omnivoracious blog

“STILL LIFE WITH MONKEY is a brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart. Pairing poetry with wisdom, this is a story about what it means to live, love, and grow.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

“Katharine Weber goes deep with the extraordinary STILL LIFE WITH MONKEY, a rich and compelling meditation on the question of what makes life worth living. Her characters are vividly, achingly real, including the tiny, furry one at the novel’s center. I kept thinking about all of them long after I’d read the final words of this beautiful book.”—Ann Packer, author of The Dive From Clausen's Pier

“In Katharine Weber’s new novel she takes on one of the most challenging subjects we know—the question of how to face a life we never imagined. She does so with great subtlety, tenderness and intelligence, as well as the beautiful prose we expect from her.”—Roxana Robinson, author of This Is My Daughter

"Among the many brilliances of Katharine Weber’s new novel, is the whole idea of a ‘still life.’ Painters saw unnatural stillness as a contradiction in terms, yet containing a mysterious truth. Here, too, mysterious truth - a car accident, a wheelchair (another contradiction), paralysis, and honest and beautifully-drawn people, stopped in midpassage. To this still life comes the capuchin monkey, the service animal who attends the disconnections of the spine, the spirit, and of the species. STILL LIFE is life still—the theme of this original, remarkable book.”—Roger Rosenblatt, author of Kayak Morning

“STILL LIFE WITH MONKEY is radiantly tender and piercingly sad. Katharine Weber is a magician of a novelist, one who writes about loss and loneliness with such compassion and humor that we feel enchanted as we read.”—Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon

“Katharine Weber is one of the wittiest, most stimulating novelists at work today.”—Chicago Tribune

“Weber remains a writer to be cherished, with the added, and quite rare, virtue of never writing a word too much.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 2018-05-28
An architect and his wife grapple with the aftermath of a catastrophic accident in Weber's sixth novel (True Confections, 2009, etc.).Duncan is left with a spinal injury after his car is broadsided by an 18-wheeler on the way back from one of the custom homes for wealthy clients that are his firm's bread and butter. Wheelchair-bound and with the use of only one weak hand, he sinks into a suicidal depression his wife, Laura, hopes will be alleviated by Ottoline, a "monkey helper" trained to perform simple manual tasks he once took for granted. Duncan does develop a bond with Ottoline, and Weber captures in amusing detail her charged interactions with Laura, viewed as a rival for their alpha male. Overall, however, the tone is dark; Duncan broods over Todd, the apprentice architect who died in the crash, and he remains angrily uncooperative with Laura's attempts to construct a new normal in their changed lives. Weber elucidates both spouses' struggles in a tough-minded narrative studded with the shrewd, not especially charitable observations that are her trademark. Twenty-five-year-old Todd is nailed with the comment, "As was true of so many of his generation, [he] thought he was entirely original in all of his gentleman hobo hipster choices"; a partner in Duncan's firm is dismissed as "secretly convinced of his own superiority…he always looked as if he had just returned from a safari or an ice-climbing expedition." There are also tender moments between Duncan and his "tentative, unambitious" twin, Gordon, and a poignant episode when Laura finds and frames the one truly original design Duncan completed in architecture school before settling for a career doing "highly adequate and entirely unremarkable work." Missed chances, like the baby the couple failed to conceive, jostle painful acknowledgments of underappreciated pleasures now denied Duncan, like gardening and cooking. His catalog of everything he has lost and his belated acknowledgment of the burden Laura has also borne form the keening climax to this stark and compelling novel.Rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion: possibly the best work yet from an always stimulating writer.

Kirkus Reviews