Customer Reviews

Love Monkey: A Novel

5 star:		(78)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

Wow, what a book. Fantastic writing and a totally believable plotline about a guy who's unlucky in love and looking for something just a little bit better. I read this book a couple of weeks ago but have to agree with the SF Chronicle review yesterday that called it exceedingly readable and wickedly funny. Bravo, and thanks for finally showing what it's really like to be a man who not only has a sense of humor, but a tender side, and nothing to do with it.

I got a big jolt out of this book because it has so many piercingly accurate things to say about the single-guy life. When he's firing off one hilarious one liner after another about his dating life, being bewildered by overly proud Super Parents or mocking the ink-stained hacks who work at New York city tabloids, Tom Farrell says the kinds of things a lot of guys say to themselves late at night after a couple of drinks. I haven't read a book as funny as this in a long time, but it's not flashy sitcom-style jokes on the one hand or moronic frat-boy jokes on the other hand. It's sophisticated, smart and, in the end, even profound. Great job.

OK, this book has women down cold. I admit it. It makes you laugh and it makes you squirm, but mostly it makes you wonder if the author is anything like his hero, Tom, a boy-man who really needs to catch a break from the parade of women he lusts after. The stuff he does to try to attract their interest (like staging a fight in a bar and attempting to make a romantic dinner with one pan) is so hilarious and yet so convincing that I'm going to make my book group read this. Hey guys: are you really like this inside?

A copydesk editor for a New York tabloid dates around and moons over the 22-year-old beauty who plays with him while holding the torch for another man. Right off the bat the narrator takes funny shots at High Fidelity, knowing this book will seem like that one. Love Monkey lacks some of the poignancy and deeper insights about men that HF has to offer, but it is still very funny. I don't know how another reviewer could say there isn't one funny line in this book. Every page is chock full of about 20. The author is very clever and can turn humorous and satirical phrases like no other contemporary novelist I've read. The start is a little slow -- you wait for some plot to develop while chuckling over the one-liners. But it does get rolling once his love interest enters the scene. I like stories about young men trying to find love in the big city, and if that's your cup of tea, you'll thoroughly enjoy this one. (It also made me want to look for his byline in the books and movie section of People magazine, a section he edits.) Other recent funny novels about young men looking for love are Question of Attraction by David Nicholls and The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. I highly recommend both.

Love Monkey is a first novel that works on two different levels, and succeeds brilliantly on both of them. It's funny, wickedly so and with many a sharp edge directed at (for instance) super-parents, overachieving cell-phone obsessed New York professionals and people who try to chat with you in elevators. But it's also about an insightful guy taking stock of himself at a crossroads, and it's this reflective tone that puts me in mind of a latter day Catcher in the Rye.

It begins with a long section that is breathlessly, can-you-top this funny, as the narrator Tom Farrell casts a gimlet eye on his snack-food and remote-control-littered bachelor hovel and invites us to laugh along with his sadly hilarious world. (A typical breakfast-after a long, Scotch-influenced night that may or may not have involved feeling sorry for himself while playing Simon and Garfunkel records-is a gallon of water and some Tylenol). He's a guy who worries that his generation-the lamest generation, the one that won no wars and launched no IPOs-will be remembered only for non-black tuxedoes, Justine Bateman and Men at Work. And his is a world where Bugs Bunny is sometimes his only friend and his occasional efforts to reach out and connect with somebody, anybody, only result in more confusion. First up is a German American paralegal, the kind who writes angry letters to the New York Times and has a habit of taking things entirely too seriously; Tom is strongly attracted to her (worrying at the same time that he could never date her because his Jewish friends would freak out), but despairs when he discovers she can't tell one Beach Boys song from the next, and has never even heard of the band's founding genius Brian Wilson. Oh well. She doesn't seem interested anyway. Moving right along.

We discover after a while that Tom is, professionally speaking, a lot more successful than you'd expect. His cynical take on everything is perfectly matched to his job: he is a gifted headline writer for a jazzed-up, hype-slinging New York City tabloid (called, natch, Tabloid) where he boasts that he was the first hack to ever call Michael Jackson "wacko Jacko," and the first to call Hugh Grant (after his arrest in the company of one Divine Brown) "overblown." The characters he works with are straight out of the classic screwball comedies of the 30s such as The Front Page. There's The Toad, a slovenly editor who is secretly scheming to make it to the top, and Rollo Thrash, a permanently soused story-chaser and raconteur who phones in his writings from a bar stool. Tom cheerfully cleans up Rollo's words but his real occupation in the newsroom is swooning. That's where Julia, an aspiring ballet dancer with a lot of knowledge of books and naughty French words, comes in. Tom is driven topsy turvy by her, and from his descriptions of her you can see why: her lips, he says, are the color of the first bottle of wine you ever got drunk on. They flirt, and do a lot more than flirt, but Julia is always holding back. It takes a long, long time for Tom to discover that she has a boyfriend. Oh yeah, and they're living together. Every guy has been in that situation with a girl-just this side of madness, willing to do anything for her. For some additional, and mighty suspect, advice in girl-chasing, he turns to his playboy best friend Shooter, a hunk in dreadlocks who owns a pair of pajamas that cost more than Tom's best suit, stands to inherit a fortune from the cole slaw business and is, unsurprisingly, the object of every young lady's affections. The banter between Shooter the cool and Tom the lost provides some of the wittiest dialogue in a book that is chock-a-block with it. Some of it reminded me of David Mamet's pointed writing. A better giver of advice is Tom's other best friend, Bran Lowenstein, a ladder-climbing TV producer who alternately tells him he's a loser and kisses him savagely when she suspects his head has been turned by another girl. You're rooting for Tom and Bran to get together-each out-wisecracks the other-but you won't be surprised if they never get together, either. Some people are just too much alike. All of these characters are so well drawn, with their every quirk and flaw captured by telling details, that you can't help but think of them as based on real New York figures. And the novel as a whole is so completely true to life that you can never, as in Catcher in the Rye, predict what is going to happen to our anti-hero next. It's rare to find a comic novel, especially a first novel (or even a tenth novel, for that matter) with this much style, wit, and poise. Smith is going to have a long career.

I heard (and read) a lot of different reviews for LOVE MONKEY, then saw Kyle Smith read from it as part of a reading series and was surprised to find myself laughing at loud (I don't do it that often). So I bought it, and I was surprised by something else - how heartfelt it was, and how closely it mirrors the situations of people I know.

LOVE MONKEY is about unrequited love, and especially unrequited love for someone who has unrequited love for someone else, and so on. Just like the main character in the book, I find myself thinking of a song...but I digress. Anyway, there are so many great lines in this book, great images and situations, that I had to start leaving scraps of paper in the pages so I could quote it to friends. It's not just the clever turns of phrase that got me (and there are many, many of them). It's that it was consistent, and that there was a really good story here.

Love Monkey is deeper and better written than your standard "lad lit," but it's also much more enjoyable than your standard literary fiction. I started reading it at 11 p.m. and finished at 3:30. That's because I had to find out what happened. I wasn't disappointed.

I read a few reviews that said the main character, Tom, is unlikeable - a typical bachelor, a man-boy. I'm female, and I'm not a fan of arrogant men, but I liked Tom and sympathized with him. He tries to do the right thing. It's clear that he wants to find one woman to love, and he'd likely be happy to stick with her, but it's held just out of his reach. He's a cad only by default.

Anyway, sometimes I have trouble finding a good read, but this was a good read. So I got on Amazon at 4 a.m. to tell other people that I think it's worth reading, too. And if you can't relate to the protagonist, you've probably had it easier in the early-thirtysomething world than a lot of us, but that's OK.

The year is short, but I doubt there will be a funnier, more entertaining novel than Love Monkey published the rest of 2004. The clueless bachelor at the center of this tour de force, Tom Farrell, superficially resembles lots of people you may know in real life, but Smith brings him to life with a thousand perfectly chosen details and witheringly acute one-liners. He's a guy who is dedicating his life to trying to figure out how to attract women (should he be honest, vulnerable and sweet? Should he act more like an arrogant jerk?), and luckily (or unluckily) for him, he is close friends with an independently rich studpuppy named Shooter whose advice on what women really want is hilarious and totally on target. Advice in hand, Tom attempts to woo a series of beautiful, accomplished Manhattan women, from a wily dancer to a super-smart TV producer whose vinegary putdowns of Tom are well justified, even if you wish they would put aside their differences and finally get it on. The author shines a 400-watt light on the field of dating, previously only explored in various superficial ways by various writers who find it difficult to come up with truly memorable characters or any thoughts or dialogue that aren't the stuff of romance novels and cliche. Love Monkey is for readers who crave a comedy that is never bland but always real and convincing, an inside look at the dating circuit that offers far more genuine that-happened-to-me laughs and delves far deeper into the singleton's psyche than Sex and the City.

When this book ended, I just wanted more. It reminded me alot of friends of mine and their adventures (good, bad and ugly) with dating. At first you may not like this character but you soon come to realize that his heart is in the right place and after all his little tricks, what he really wants is to fall in love. It's a funny book, miles better than the average for this kind of story.

Finally a smart, entertaining answer to chick lit. This is the book for guys who want, no need a gender-friendly read like Bridget Jones and The Nanny Diaries, something good, fast, funny, and occasionially poignant. Smith writes with zip, humor and insight of a journalist in Manhattan, a lonely guy who is ensnared by love and then by real life. The nitwit who gave Smith's novel one star is missing one key ingredient - wit. He's simply a nit. Never mind going to the neighborhood bar for a beer and a yarn. Order this up, pop the top and enjoy.

Can't say enough good things about this very clever book. I'm an old married lady (of 36), but this certainly took me back to what it was like to be single, and despite being married for 9 years I still learned an awful lot about how men think. (In fact, I wish I had this book before I got married). My husband is reading this right now and he's really having a good time with it. It's very refreshing to hear this distinctive new voice talk about the same things we've all heard women writing about for a million years.