“If you take any event and isolate it, blow it up huge so you can study its slightest grain, there’d be a million tiny impossibilities worming every which way across the landscape, all the unlikely variables, all of the unaccounted-for seconds, all of the chance collisions falling too perfectly into place. That’s what life is.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 19, 2011)

Lightning People is an electrifying book, a high voltage tightrope of five 30-something characters that are walking the edge in the post 9/11 New York City. It’s a book about true connections, missed connections and downright parasitic connections. Its energy strikes and surges randomly, briefly illuminating, sometimes plunging back into the darkness. And by the end, it leaves the reader rubbing eyes as he or she emerges back into a transformed light.

In crucial ways, its theme is similar to the Oscar-winning movie Crash. One of the key characters in that movie said: “In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Move the setting from L.A. to New York. An ensemble of rootless characters crash into each other as they struggle to find meaningful interactions. There is the actor Joseph Giteau, who left his Ohio home and his reclusive and conspiracy-obsessed mother, newly married to Del Kousavos, a snake expert at a city zoo who is on a work visa from Greece. In the aftermath of 9/11, he finds himself at thriving prisonerofearth conspiracy meetings, trying to take stock and make sense of his life.

Joseph and Del are surrounded by others: Raj, Del’s exotic and not-yet-forgotten former lover and his sister Madi, Del’s best friend, an executive at a company outsourcing jobs to India. And lastly, there is William Asternathy, whose career is on permanent hiatus, on “fast live-wire current circulating through the city.”

All of these characters try to remake their fate and their destiny in that shining yet alienated city of re-creation, New York. Del considers: ”The whole city was pulsating with electricity. It had been all of the light that had first attracted her to New York, had brought all of the fresh arrivals beating around the same shine. But what happens when her eyes finally adjusted to the light?” And William thinks, “No one in New York has parents. Or families for that matter. We’re all pretty much immigrants taking shelter here.”

As the action pulsates forward, secrets emerge or remain hidden, and it’s very important for each reader to experience the arc of these secrets individually. Among the questions raised are, “Will a generational health secret derail Joseph and Del’s marriage and end Joseph’s life prematurely? How will William’s dark self-destructive streak affect those around him and what damage will it do? And are the conspiracy theories – deriving from the Latin phrase “breathe together” – a shared paranoia or are they self-fulfilling prophecies?”

As these characters brush against each other – sometimes willingly, sometimes inadvertently – sparks are set off. “Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice until it does,” muses Joe. Coincidences are packed into coincidences, but that is the fabric of the novel; how our lives all intersect and how one shocking personal tragedy can alter our paths, individually and collectively.

This is an intricate novel, beautifully plotted, brimming with high-stakes paranoia and calamity and angst, narrated with vigor and flashes of insight. It is difficult to believe this is a debut novel and it certainly goes on my Top Ten list for 2011.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christopher Bollen
EXTRAS:	Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Handbook of Lightning Survivors by Michele Young-Stone The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

Bibliography:

• Lightning People (August 2011)

“Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (DEC 3, 2009)
SPECIAL: MF Author Interview

Humans have varied and convoluted relationships with the animals on this planet. We eat some, wear others, and a few enjoy or endure the precarious position of becoming household pets. Sometimes the relationships people have with their animals make the headlines. Take for example, Dutch artist Katinka Simonse–who strangled and then skinned her own cat before turning it into a handbag. While this act unleashed a storm of controversy and a range of reactions, it also raises many questions. What, for example, is the difference between Katinka’s feline purse and a purse made of cow hide? Is the difference between the death of the pet cat and the death of a cow a moral question or a question of species? Do “owners” have the moral and legal right to kill their pets? Should Simonse be prosecuted for animal cruelty? This case illustrates the complexity of animal rights issues precisely because we humans pick and chose which animals we will love and cherish and which ones we will objectify. There’s a moral dissonance afoot in our relationships with animals, and it’s a dissonance that allows us to coo about how much we love animals while we continue to exploit them through factory farms and animal experimentation.

And these complex moral issues are at the fore in the short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet–a short story collection which “treads newly imaginative territory with charismatic tales focused on our fascination with famous people, animals and human-animal relations.” Each of these ten stories examines some aspect of human interaction with animals with some of the stories focusing on real people and fictionalized animal related incidents in their lives. In “Sexing the Pheasant,” for example, we enter the mind of Madonna–a singer notorious for her radical self-inventions. In the story, Madonna newly married to Guy Ritchie and still in the warm glow of her British phase, dons a hunting outfit and totes a rifle around. In “Girl and Giraffe,” George Adamson tells a haunting tale of one afternoon spent in the African bush.

One of the stories, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov” incorporates a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction incident involving Edison and the 1903 electrocution of an elephant. This true story, set to fiction for the purposes of the collection, records the death sentence duly delivered to Topsy:

“Topsy, the elephant in question, was a disgruntled circus and work animal who had suffered the pains of forced labor, captivity, neglect and abuse. She had responded by killing three men, the last of whom fed her a burning cigarette.

Simple shooting would not have been theatrical enough for her owners, Thompson & Dundy of Coney Island’s Luna Park, had decided to make an example of the rogue.”

And this “example” results in the hideous electrocution of Topsy, her “fiery death” duly recorded on film.

In the title story “Love in Infant Monkeys” based on fact, animal researcher and psychologist, Harry Harlow, moves between his laboratory and a faculty party. Harlow, seen by some as a key figure in the rise of the Animal Liberation Movement is depicted as a troubled man, a “functioning alcoholic” whose familial relationships leave a lot to be desired. His lack of connection with his estranged children is reflected in his experiments–extreme isolation experiments using baby monkeys. Harlow’s sadistic callousness is evident here as he records–without emotion–the decline of monkeys in the “pits of despair.” (Harlow named the apparatus himself. For example, he also named the forced mating device, the “rape racks.”)

Of this excellent collection, “Sir Henry” remains my favorite. It’s the story of a New York based professional dog walker, a conscientious and sensitive man who selects wealthy, reliable clients in order to insulate himself from exposure to the harsher aspects of dog ownership:

“When a dog was taken from him—a move, a change of fortune or, in one painful case, a spontaneous gifting—he felt it deeply. His concern for a lost dog, as he thought of them would keep him up for many nights after one of these incidents. When a young Weimaraner was lost to him with not even a chance to say goodbye, he remained angry for weeks. The owner, a teenage heiress often featured in the local tabloids, had given his charge away on a spurt of the moment to a Senegalese dancer she met at a restaurant. He had no doubt that drug use was involved. The dog, a timid, damaged animal of great gentleness and forbearance, was on a plane to Africa by the time he found out about it the next day.”

The dog walker prefers dogs to humans as dogs are clearly our “moral superiors.” To the dog walker, most people are unworthy of owning a dog and they are not as much dog owners as “dog neglecters.” While the dog walker imagines that he has rules for accepting clients that will shield him from the more painful aspects of his job, he is ambushed by an unforeseen incident involving a poodle owned by an elderly violinist.

These excellent stories run the gamut of the relationships between humans and animals–we read of beloved pets, not-so-beloved pets, research animals that exist to fulfill sadistic paradigms, zoo animals, wild animals, animals as accessories, and animals as entertainment. While animals exist to fill whatever needs and whims humans may have, we also see the hypocrisy of humans in their relationships with animals as well as a total lack of accountability in how we treat them. And that lack of accountability ranges from the ownership of our pets to the shadowy world of animal experimentation in which sadism seems indistinguishable from “data collection.” Yet in spite of the subject matter, Millet, in telling these stories manages to remain an observer and a recorder rather than a moralist. This sometimes uncomfortable position is left for the reader.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lydia Millet
EXTRAS:	ExcerptOur interview with Lydia Millet
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of  How the Dead Dream

Bibliography:

• Ominvores (1996)
• George Bush: Dark Prince of Love (2000)
• My Happy Life (2002) 
• Everyone’s Pretty (2005)
• Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)
• Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories (2009)

Trilogy:

• How the Dead Dream (2008)
• Ghost Lights (2011)
• Magnificence (November 2012)

For younger readers:

• The Fires Beneath the Sea (July 2011)

Other:

• State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (terrific essay on Arizona)