Customer Reviews

New World Monkeys: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It's a little difficult to review this book properly without giving too much of the plot away. Suffice it to say that if you like quirky characters and tongue-in-cheek plotting you will have a lot of fun with "New World Monkeys". One drawback of the book is that it attempts to integrate a rather serious, traditional story about the difficulties of relationships and marriage into another, larger story which lampoons corporate mores and "country living", and that larger story is presented in a surreal, humorous manner. Some readers might feel that all the pieces don't quite fit together, but the book is written so well and the characters and humor are so "spot on", that Ms. Mauro, at the end of the day, has crafted a successful first novel. The husband and wife protagonists, Duncan and Lily, are not very pleasant people, but it is a tribute to the author's skill that we do care about these people and what happens to them. Just like real people, they make some decisions that other people might not make in the same situation, or even comprehend. Some might find some of their actions morally objectionable. But Duncan and Lily do learn from their mistakes. The book is a "page-turner" and I couldn't wait to reach the end to find out how all the plotlines would turn out. This isn't a perfect book, but it is a very good book and I am interested to see what Ms. Mauro comes up with in her second novel.

OMG!
I had no idea what I would be getting into when I started this novel. And the journey has been just wonderful. Duncan and Lily are on their way from their Manhattan life--she is doing research for her doctorate while he works for a Mad Men-type ad agency--to the much-in-need-of-care Victorian house that Victoria has inherited. They are in their early thirties and have been married for a while. Actually too long.
The novel opens with a bang! Their Saab has had a run in with a pig, but not an ordinary one. It dies, thanks to a whack on the head when Lily is quit certain it will charge her. Oh, no, this just happens to be a horned one named The Soverieng of the Deep Wood and the beloved pet of a character you just do not want living in your town. Actually you don't want many of the character you will meet living in your town, including Lloyd who is a really talented voyeur.
Duncan becomes obsessed with his new ad campaign, so much of his time is spent during the week back in Manhattan. And Lily, alone or sort of alone during the week, spends her time research an archaic arch concept in architecture. But she soon befriends Lloyd.
And I must mention Tinker. It seems that back in 1902 Tinker was killed and quite possibly her bones are the ones Lily and Duncan are attempting to extract from their garden that is no longer a garden.
I don't want to tell much more. I found this to be a somewhat slow read, mostly because I just had to go back to re-read things because they were either so funny or so outrageous that I wanted a second helping.
I have never read a book like this. And I hope Nancy Mauro is busy, busy, busy writing a new one.

This novel fails to make itself into more than the sum of its parts. The main plot lines include a couple's failing relationship, an encounter with a wild boar and associated half-hearted attempt at evoking some kind of "children of the corn" or "the lottery" town evil vibe, a husband's advertising campaign, a wife's academic failure, a homeless Virgil leading her on a cheap day return tour of the circles of perversion, and a venture into some do-it-yourself forensic anthropology. Each of the ideas seems worth writing about. Unfortunately, none of the individual elements is strong enough to carry the load of the theme assigned to it, much less lend any support to the other threads. The result is a rather drab tapestry.

The weakest plot element is the husband's career downslide. It's a feeble mishmash Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now, and the Madison Ave archtype. It even has a bit of Fight Club thrown in at the end (who chewed the pencils, eh?) While it does give him some backstory for his angst, it could easily have been left out of the novel completely.

One big culprit here is the author's muddy prose. Ideas are only vaguely expressed and half thought out. It's as if there were dozens of paragraphs I never got to read, or some editor had crossed off every other line without insisting that the author rewrite to condense the missing material into the remainder. I know the old "never use two sentences when one will do" rule- but the author seems to have missed the last four words.

On a more positive note, the ideas and themes themselves are each fairly interesting. And for the most part, the separate threads transition from one to the other easily. There is no abrupt leaving off one story line to switch to another. The exception is switching to/from the sub plot of the husband's career issues, which is very clumsy due to the author's choice of making the husband travel in and out of the City. The husband and wife seem fully dimensional, and the dialog seems believable.

I would not recommend this book as a purchase, especially in hard cover. As a library borrow or a paperback (preferrably used or from a swap), it might be worth a summer afternoon at the beach. But even then, there are many better choices available so I'd still say "pass this one by."

Some authors are all about plot and some are all about character. Nancy Mauro's debut novel clearly places her a deeply in the latter camp. Her characters are lively and so quirky they'd give USA Channel pause, and they did keep me reading in fits and starts despite the peculiar feel of a book trying to straddle the line between humor and drama.

The plot involves a young couple, Duncan and Lily, who leaves the problems of Manhattan to spend the summer in Lily's newly-inherited upstate mansion, where they hope to get both their lives and their marriage back on track. But from the time they hit a wild boar and Lily takes a tire iron to its skull to put it out of its misery, things get decidedly more interesting. It seems the boar was the town mascot and a beloved pet. Then the couple find and dig up a mysterious grave in the mansion's back yard, providing them with something to fixate on besides their worsening marriage.

The cast of peculiar characters, including the rather unlikable protagonists, Duncan and Lily, provide a lot of entertainment and the novel works well on that level. But the author tries to mix the quirkiness with far too much soap-style drama for my taste. (To be fair, any amount of soapy drama is too much soapy drama for me.)

Mauro is a writer to watch, but New World Monkeys, while literate, is self-conscious and over-written, just as many first novels are. Once Mauro learns to relax and not try so hard, to enjoy her characters and let them tell their stories, I think we'll be seeing some terrific reads.

Estranged couple Lily and Duncan leaves the heat of Manhattan to spend part of the summer in the Upstate New York town of Osterhaven although he knows it will be a long commute as h is an ad exec in the Big Apple. Their drive is uneventful until near the house they leased, the couple hits an apparent wild boar running out of nowhere onto the road Lily feeling for the beast still alive but crying in severe pain takes the tire iron and smashes the animal's head until he is dead.

In Osterhaven, they learn the boar they killed is considered sacred by townsfolk as the Sovereign of the Deep Wood. In particular he was Skinner's pet and the angry odious man vows similar deaths to the killers; as does other fuming residents. The house they rented is dilapidated and while exploring outside Duncan finds a gravestone and a human bone. Stunned they disinter the remains of the buried body. While Duncan is in New York City, Lily becomes friends with the town pervert who she finds she can communicate with easier than her spouse.

This is an entertaining graveyard humor thriller tale that paints a neat twist to the urban yuppie finding heaven in rustication as both the big city and small town are made up of two legged beasts. The key to this engaging tale is Nancy Mauro never takes the subject too gravely serious as the author uses hyperbolic ghoulishness to make a case that veracity is the foundation of any relationship.

Harriet Klausner

Duncan and Lily, a newly married couple, are grappling with the disappointments of life and marriage. As an attempt to reestablish a connection, they decide to move out of the bustle of New York City for the summer to a mansion Lily has inherited in upstate New York. On the trip upstate, they hit and kill a wild boar, and this accident sets in motion an unlikely series of events involving an eccentric cast of characters.

Certain parts of this story are sluggish (for example, we learn lots of detail about Lily's dissertation on the topic of pre-Renaissance architecture). For the most part, however, a host of zany events keeps the momentum moving and the suspense intact. Along with wondering whether Duncan's and Lily's marriage will survive, the cast of colorful small town characters is the most entertaining aspect of this novel.

Duncan and Lily are the ultimate couple - he is an up-and-comer in advertising and she is the academic completing her dissertation. The relationship has grown stale, almost to the point of hostility, when Lily inherits some property Upstate. They decide to summer there to possibly salvage the remains of their quickly disintegrating marriage. Lily will work on her disseration and Duncan will commute during the work week to the City. The first, emotionally icy trip there, they have an unfortunate automobile-versus-boar incident that brings out the basic elements in each of their personalities. And then they discover that not only are they considered to be "from away" to the local townspeople, they have unwittingly murdered the beloved town mascot. Trying to settle into the small town, Duncan makes attempts to bond with the men and Lily ends up befriending the local peeping tom/pervert.

Sounds like a great premise for a quirky story, right? I thought so, too.

Unfortunately, the execution of this premise falls short of the promise of it. I got so bogged down in trying to find a rhythm with the words, sentence structure, etc., that I often gave up on the book. The act of reading was a chore. It took me more than two months to finish this book (and it's not really that long), and that's usually a very good indication that I'm not involved in the story. I ended up finishing it because I'm always convinced that if I quit a book, *that's* when the story will get good. That didn't happen for me, although I hope I'm in the minority with that opinion. Duncan and Lily were impossible for me to like - I couldn't find that glimmer of redemption in either of them that would make me care what happened to them. Ironically, the only character I felt anything about was The Sovereign of the Deep Wood (the boar), and his physical presence in the story is brief.

This wasn't my cup of tea. That's the way with books, and I hope the author finds more raves than rants, but New World Monkeys isn't for me.

"What's gone wrong for us?" That's the seminal question in Nancy Mauro's debut novel "New World Monkeys". It's the story of Lily and Duncan, partners in a marriage of five years that is decaying as surely as a rotten tooth. The couple has embarked on an ambiguous summer; she is to stay at her ancestral summer house in upstate New York, he plans to join her on weekends from his ad agency job in NYC. Just outside the rural town, they hit, or are hit by, a wild boar. A pivotal moment occurs; Duncan hesitates, Lily acts. Unforeseeable, and frankly unbelievable, complications ensue.

What Mauro gets right is the declining marriage. She ably fleshes out a relationship that is more grievance than love and illustrates poignantly the "absence of harmony" between them. We wince at, but acknowledge, the familiarity of the petty cruelties that married people often perpetrate upon each other.

Mauro, who herself works in an ad agency, probably also "gets right" the surreal nature of ad campaigns, though I confess skepticism here. Yes, I do believe that much of advertising in inherently misogynistic, but the ad campaign that Duncan puts together for a brand of women's jeans is over-the-top abhorrent.

What doesn't ring true to me at all is Lily's befriending of a pervert and subsequent foray into becoming a peeping Tom herself, or the Rambo-esque character of Skinner, the late boar's owner. Also puzzling was the sub-plot of a century-old murder. Why would BOTH Duncan and Lily become jointly and insanely enraptured so much as to agree to illogical and self-destructive actions? Yet the novel held my interest as I was much intrigued by what Lily and Duncan would do next...and at last.

In her debut novel, Nancy Mauro's new world is more than literary fiction. It is a microcosm of trials that test any relationship and the lives of the individuals who comprise it.

Married for five years, Lily and Duncan inadvertently run over a boar, an upstate New York town mascot, where Lily inherits an old Victorian house. The house is a smaller version of The Money Pit "primed for torching, dilapidated beyond its Queen Anne elegance." The celebrity-status mascot is named Sovereign of the Deep Wood, according to flyers depicting the tusked boar Lily whacked with a tire iron to put out of its misery after Duncan ran over it. The longer Lily and Duncan conceal complicity of the tell-tale swine slaughter, the more they feel townsfolk taunt them with knowledge of Sovereign's disappearance.

Every night at 10, ancient artillery is fired as a warning to pig thieves at large. Lily thinks breakfast bacon is a mockery of her evil act. Duncan's mind morphs every innocent question into an ad agency skit conspired to implicate him in pig genocide. Lunch-chucking scenes follow discovery that the pig corpse is missing. Lily eventually confesses the crime to likable Lloyd the Peeping Tom, the "Town Perv," knowing that he can't blackmail her. "It ran out in the middle of the road. It didn't exactly die. I had to sort of beat it to death." Lily's cure-all for the swine flu.

Lily researches her dissertation subject at the small-town library, while Duncan is a New York ad agency writer "creating commercials that most people want to avoid" and tries his hand at gardening. He discovers a human bone and tiny gravestone dated 1902, with only the name TINKER. Tinker is known by locals to be the nanny who allegedly kidnapped Lily's turn-of-the-century infant grandfather. Each weekend, Duncan drives "two hours to escape the lunatic fringe in the city only to be greeted by its rural counterpart" in Osterhagen.

At the library, Lily sees Missing Pig posters with a photo of Sovereign wearing a cape --- too late to let Osterhagenites know that Sovereign's death was an accident. Wag-tongues gossip that Sovereign was stolen. Everyone comes under suspicion, including Lily and Duncan, whose wild imaginations cause problems in their marriage. The pig killers need a reason to question the sincerity of their marriage. Both fear rejection of the other, sexual initiation by either, both wanting to be last in a losing race to nowhere. From her perspective, "Lily had evolved as a species. While he remained terrestrial and not quite upright she had entered the order of new world monkeys, was afforded a superior position among the trees." Each blames the other for little dramas played out in the tiny town, all for the lack of communication.

Lily and Duncan are determined to become amateur detectives and archaeologists, unearthing and reassembling Tinker's bones in the cellar. Just a tiny problem: Sovereign's owner Skinner has a poodle determined to dig up Tinker's century-old skeleton. Skinner questions why his remaining pet is intrigued with his new neighbors' garden crater. On daily dog retrieval, Skinner notices Duncan's mangled Saab bumper, just the right-sized dent to have been made by a certain mascot boar. Though apparently a few whiskers shy of a full beard, Skinner tries his own hand at playing Dick Tracy, telling Lily that his pooch dragged home a human bone. Pooh-poohing the idea that whoever killed Sovereign also kills humans, she asks, "Why was the bone in the same ditch as the boar?" Oops!

With clever banter and emphasis placed on frivolous issues that often plague relationships and the need for communication, NEW WORLD MONKEYS will appeal to the Generation Y set turning 30-something, who as teens "grew up between Iraq and Iraq."

--- Reviewed by L. Dean Murphy

I wasn't really sure what to expect from New World Monkeys when I received it. A lot of people described it as absurd and they were certainly right. I don't think the book made me think as much as it wanted to but it was at least an enjoyable experience.

Lily and Duncan are strange protagonists and I found it hard to get behind them in the book. They're troubles were hard for me to relate to and I wasn't sure how much I cared about them.

I can't really think of another thing to compare New World Monkeys to. It's like a strange Tim Burton movie as the protagonists are very strange people. This book is not for everyone but I at least thought it was interesting for awhile at least. Proceed with caution when it comes to this book.