Monkeys
Book | Susan Minot
A family of nine becomes a family of eight in this quiet novel-in-stories.
With Monkeys Susan Minot gives voice to a big Boston family, the Vincents, alternating in narration from first-person plural to third-person to first-person singular. In so doing, she astutely conveys the family's dissolution following the death of the Vincent matriarch Rosie: from what once was a chorus of seven ice-skating kids, emerge seven young adults struggling in the isolation of personal despair. Minot's spare prose modulates wonderfully throughout this novel told in stories, both evoking the children's star-struck observations of their mother and the moments of loneliness, grief, and fear that linger in their home after her death. Minot's tenderness for Rosie, however, isn't quite equaled in the children's father, Augustus. He is an alcoholic afterthought, and even when he's the only parent left, he never attains Rosie's complexity of character. Of course this only makes Rosie's death all the more heart-wrenching. It's as though the seams of the family have been split, and the children she once so lovingly called "monkeys" can never again share the first-person plural voice of this moving novel's first story.
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