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Summary
Summary
"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.
Author Notes
Francine Prose was born on April 1, 1947. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. Francine Prose novel The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007. Prose has served as president of PEN American Center, a New York City based literary society of writers, editors, and translators that works to advance literature in 2007 and 2008.
Prose novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on college campuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. In 2014 her title Lovers at the Chameleon Club - Paris 1932, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MISTER MONKEY, by Francine Prose. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) The dreadful revival of a musical based on a children's novel about an orphaned chimp is observed through various points of view in this fresh, Chekhovian novel. FUTURE SEX, by Emily Witt. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A 30-something woman's smart, funny account of her contemporaries' exploration of desire in digital-era San Francisco. KARL MARX: Greatness and Illusion, by Gareth Stedman Jones. (Belknap/Harvard University, $35.) A British historian's gracefully written definitive biography focuses on the man, not the ideology. TRUEVINE. Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, by Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) Ariveting account of two albino African-American brothers who were exhibited in a circus. THE RED CAR, by Marcy Dermansky. (Liveright, $24.95.) Surreal encounters and wry observations abound as an aspiring novelist drives cross-country in this tightly written novel. THE LESSER BOHEMIANS, by Eimear McBride. (Hogarth, $26.) McBride brings style and voice to the familiar tale of a girl who leaves a small town for the city and meets a damaged older man. THE MOTH SNOWSTORM: Nature and Joy, by Michael McCarthy. (New York Review, $24.95.) A British environmental journalist's impassioned plea that we celebrate the joy of nature. AMERICAN ULYSSES: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, by Ronald C. White. (Random House, $35.) Grant's virtues shine in White's thorough biography. COLLECTED POEMS, by Marie Ponsot. (Knopf, $35.) This compilation of the work of an underrated poet, now 95, includes new poems as well as old. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.
Kirkus Review
With her customary sure hand, veteran novelist Prose (Household Saints, 2016, etc.) trains various points of view on the shabby dramatization of a popular childrens 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 fathers scheming girlfriend, and saved by the lawyer Portia, who (of course) turns out to be Dads 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 Dramahoned technique to a tawdry production whose pubescent star, Adam, has started using Mister Monkeys interactions with the lawyer as an excuse to hump Margot onstage. Moving into Adams 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; Edwards kindergarten teacher, who winds up on a disastrous blind date at a restaurant seated next to Mister Monkeys author; the waiter Mario, also lonely and bereaved, who provides the novels hopeful final development based on totally false premises. Prose hilariously nails the down-at-the-heels milieupoor Margot is stuck in a ridiculous wig and hideous costume mandated by the pretentious directorwhile also evoking the magic even low-rent theater can inspire in the narratives of the shows 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 authors vintage manner, with a warmth that softens the satire just enough. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
