Monkeys
Susan Minot
"I read the book Monkeys, which is - excuse me - I guess called a novel, but it seems more like a collection of related short stories.
Monkeys is about a family; I can't remember the name of the family, but it's an Irish-Catholic family that lives I think in the 60's and 70's, maybe more the 70's, in the Boston area. They have a summer house on the water, maybe on the cape or close to the cape - Cape Cod. So yeah, it's about the family, it's about the dysfunctional family. They have like eight kids, and the father's an alcoholic, and the parents are sort of - there's a lot of distance in the family. The mother ends up dying in a car crash and kind of follows the family as they grow up through the probably late 60's or early 70's through the 80's.
The writing is brilliant. She's - it's very much literary fiction. So she's an excellent writer, happens to be a graduate of Columbia's MFA program. I grew up in the Boston area myself, and I'm not Irish-Catholic, but I grew up around a lot of Irish-Catholics, so it was a little bit of I guess nostalgia for me now that I live out in California.
I suppose there's like a spare style to the prose, which is part of what I liked and didn't like, but maybe part of - that might have been partly a style. I think it was written 20 years ago, if I remember correctly. I would recommend people like to read. Basically anybody who likes a good read, people who are interested in the dysfunctional family and want an interesting psychological portrait of a family that's struggling. I have to give this four stars."
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