Mister Monkey

August 29, 2016
The story of Prose’s (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932) latest novel is the story of Mister Monkey, a regrettable children’s musical, itself based on the unlikely success of a (fictional) novel written several decades earlier by a Vietnam vet named Ray and starring a monkey “rescued” from the jungles of Africa to live a domestic life with a human family. That the musical production is terrible is the one thing on which all the characters agree. Margot, the bitter leading lady, who was once a promising young actress and is now questioning her choices; Adam, its problem-child star in a gorilla suit whom all adults want to punish or medicate; Mario, a lifelong waiter in the audience who takes a shine to Margot: everyone knows the story, its premise, and its songs are awful. Each chapter relays the perspective of a different character, including the play’s actors and more tangential people. In one section, an aging gentleman takes his grandson to the play, trying to forge a deeper relationship with him in the face of his own ailing health and mounting isolation. In another chapter, that same boy’s kindergarten teacher confronts the depths of her loneliness during a very bad date at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, where the waiter happens to be Mario. As absorbing and three-dimensional as each character is, the development of the actual novel feels awkwardly formulaic, and the strangeness of the play itself (for instance, Margot plays the monkey’s lawyer in a rainbow wig) is stilted, despite the genuine intrigue of each scene in the novel.

With her customary sure hand, veteran novelist Prose (Household Saints, 2016, etc.) trains various points of view on the shabby dramatization of a popular children's book.Mister Monkey, as summarized in the prologue, is the simplistic, bestselling tale of an orphaned African chimp adopted by an affluent Manhattan family, unjustly accused by the widowed father's scheming girlfriend, and saved by the lawyer Portia, who (of course) turns out to be Dad's new love. The even tackier musical version is first seen through the weary eyes of Margot, the middle-aged actress playing Portia and valiantly applying her Yale Drama-honed technique to a tawdry production whose pubescent star, Adam, has started using Mister Monkey's interactions with the lawyer as an excuse to hump Margot onstage. Moving into Adam's consciousness, Prose makes poignantly manifest the family issues that prompted his bad behavior, and she elicits similar empathy for the damaged characters who serially pick up the narrative from there: a grieving widower and his grandson Edward in the audience; Edward's kindergarten teacher, who winds up on a disastrous blind date at a restaurant seated next to Mister Monkey's author; the waiter Mario, also lonely and bereaved, who provides the novel's hopeful final development based on totally false premises. Prose hilariously nails the down-at-the-heels milieu--poor Margot is stuck in a ridiculous wig and hideous costume mandated by the pretentious director--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. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2016
Chekhov-loving Margot is trying hard to be positive about her role in a way-off-Broadway production, Mister Monkey the Musical, a clumsy adaptation of a beloved children's book. But she loathes her humiliating costume, and during the signal performance around which this multivoice novel revolves, she is shocked by the sexually aggressive behavior of 12-year-old Adam, who is playing Mister Monkey. But the show must go on. 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! Adam, who feels that he is halfway between a boy and an animal, worries about the global-warming apocalypse. Eleanor is an ER nurse; Lakshmi a struggling grad student. We also enter the psyches of a precocious, dinosaur-loving boy; his lonely kindergarten teacher; the Vietnam vet who wrote Mister Monkey; and a waiter devoted to theater. 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.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: National, all-media outreach will promote Prose's irresistible novel as the acclaimed writer tours coast-to-coast.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2016

Prose's 18th work of fiction (after Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932) introduces a cast of characters who are all, in one way or another, connected to a misbegotten off-off-Broadway production of a children's musical called Mister Monkey. Among others, we meet the horny and depressed adolescent playing the title role; a once promising, now middle-aged, actress stuck in a thankless role and a terrible costume; a young audience member, his grandfather, and his kindergarten teacher; the author of the novel the play is based on; and the waiter to whom he gives a ticket to the show. The characters' lives intersect in both direct and indirect ways, as topics as varied as career disappointment, online dating, evolution, and what it means to be human are explored. Did I mention it's funny? Prose deftly manages the delicate balance of the comic novel, presenting humor and absurdity without sacrificing the humanity of her characters. The book is also something of a love letter to New York, with much time spent in subways and taxis, and the characters crossing paths in unexpected ways, whether or not they are aware of it. VERDICT A fairly breezy read with hidden, and not so hidden, depths. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/16.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016

The Off-Off Broadway children's musical Mister Monkey has been running too long, as Margot, who plays the chimp's lawyer, surely knows. Witty mayhem ensues when she receives a letter from a secret admirer and has an unsettling encounter midperformance with the 12-year-old who plays the title character. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.