Yesterday I read The Love Song of Monkey by Michael S.A. Graziano (published in 2008).  This book is a creative take on the mid-life crisis, a fable about re-evaluating what you want out of life and deciding to make some changes.  When you have achieved immortal status (unkillable by any means) but are immobilized in a coma and sunk twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, you have plenty of time to think about your life.

And yet what is strange about this book  — so much of it is strange but some of it is wonderfully strange and some of it is just unfulfilled strange –  is that our hero does not actually think about much at all.  During all the wet decades he spends manacled to a bust of Venus and then during his dry years spent as a  lava-bound sculpture in a museum, he gives no thoughts to the details of his past, the details that would have made him interesting to us.  We know he regrets being a “dick” because he tells us so but we are given few details as to how he happened to have the one “fling” that gave him AIDs, and nothing at all about his marriage or his wife (other than she is an anorexic “flibbertigibbet”), no clue as to his job or pets or talents.  He tells us he is meditating on his life but we are not given any insight into what he is actually thinking about during the meditation.

Such lack of detail regarding the previous life of our proto-man is even stranger given the excruciating (and I mean this in a good way) details we are given on the horrific process that rendered the poor man comatose and immortal, and on what it feels like to live under the sea, what it is like to go down into a deep sea vent and then be spewed up as lava, and details on life as a sculpture in a museum.  Yet without the context of his life before, we just don’t really care that much about our immortal hero, even after spending decades and pages with him.  He is interesting as a phenomenon and as an enigma –  we wonder how the heck he will get out of the predicament he finds himself in — but he is not interesting to us as a human seeking to make changes — and struggling to get there.

Without history, there is no story.  Without a past to move against, there can be no movement, no change, no transition, no catharsis. The Love Song of Monkeyis clever, well-wrought, and certainly original, but it was just a flibbertigibbet, to steal a word from the author.