Kyle Smith, “Love Monkey” (New York: William Morrow, 2004).
“Sadist and a masochist go on a date,” Rollo says. “The masochist says, ‘Aren’t you going to hit me?’ The sadist says, ‘No.’ …”
“Love Monkey,” p. 173.
This novel may best be described as a New York single man’s response to “Bridget Jones’ Diary.” I have no idea whether this book has been sold to the movies – but if it hasn’t been, it certainly should be. It would make a great fluffy romantic comedy, “tasty and less filling” than most, starring, say, John Cusak of “High Fidelity” fame as the love-hungry hero and Nicole Kidman as the love-interest and all around babe-to-dream-about.
I am somewhat divided in my reactions to this book that is normally the sort of bestseller that I’d never read. (I purchased it partly because the cover featured a photo of a woman’s leg that I found exciting.) Surprisingly, I like the literary voice that emerges from these pages, which were written by someone named “Kyle Smith.” According to the dust jacket, Mr. Smith is a first-time novelist and a graduate of Yale University.
Since I hope to be a first-time novelist too, I find it difficult not to cheer for Mr. Smith. Although I tend to enjoy detesting anyone who is a graduate of an elite university and often delight in humiliating the poor bastards with a demonstration of how little they really know, even by comparison with a ghetto-dwelling-free-lancer, like myself, but only in order to feel guilty and contrite about it afterwards.
The protagonist and narrator of this work of literature is “Tom Farrell.” And this novel certainly qualifies as a work of literature, even though it is a highly entertaining book, proving that “fun” and “quality” are words that can still describe a single book. Tom is a self-described “manboy.” Who isn’t? Women figured out long ago that most men are merely “children of a larger growth,” which is O.K. with them, usually, because women sometimes want, shall we say, the “larger growth” and at other times they like the child in us.
Tom has a good job writing headlines for a tabloid newspaper that resembles a cross between “The New York Post” and one of those supermarket rags that feature front pages that scream about Pam Anderson dating a Jewish alien or George W. Bush being a secret agent for Al Quaida. Tom’s life has fallen into a pattern. He drinks, chases “girls” (his term), drinks some more, “jerks off” (again, his term) when the girls elude him, then staggers to the office in the morning to fantazise about more of the same. He lives to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings. Bugs Bunny is the last real action hero for many members of my generation. Tom listens to the middle-brow music of the sixties, seventies, eighties and to the funky stuff from today. In other words, this is all depressingly familiar to the educated male reader of a certain age in Manhattan.
Tom then meets “Julia” and finds himself “smitten,” but only to get used and abused by the cunning little vixen – women can be so cruel. He is both devastated by her and even more by being forced to be without her, without the sparkle of her “mysterious green eyes” and the perfume in her blond hair. The real test here is, of course, whether he will feel the same when Julia is 45, and the sad news that I have to give him is that he will only love her MORE when both of them are 45. I recognize the symptoms: Julia has Tom under her spell for life and there is no escape for him.
There is a stunning sadness and yearning just beneath the surface of Mr. Smith’s deceptively witty and accessible prose. Sorrow and loss lurk in unexpected places in this story. There is also a great romance in the silences between these sentences. Mr. Smith is a Romantic (yes, that’s with a capital “R”), so that, somewhere inside him there is a Latino with a guitar struggling to get out and strum that guitar, while presenting “Julia” with a rose.
Tom loves women, even though it hurts so much to do so, because of the slim possiblity that one or two of them might someday love him. To put it mildly, I can relate to this.
Perhaps Mr. Smith, like his narrator, has a bit of Irish blood in him. If so, this would explain a great deal. As Miguel Unamuno once said, the Irish are “the Latins of the north.” They know all about those un-American traditions of living with tragedy, defeat, loss, not to mention the proximity of such things always to romantic love. It was W.B. Yates who suggested that human beings are “in love with what vanishes.” The joke quoted at the outset in this review may serve as the complete theory of love contained within this work of fiction, and for no extra charge. In the same way, Shakespeare’s plays usually provide a much richer meditation on the nature of love, among other things, and not just in the obvious tragedies like “Romeo and Juliet,” but more interestingly in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and in Portia’s riddles in “The Merchant of Venice.” Mr. Smith is in good company.
Manhattan’s social scene is well observed. The utter incomprehensibility of women is acknowledged with a tip of the authorial hat. Tom tells Julia that, if he were to write about her, she would merit a full novel and not a mere story. The “Julias” in our lives usually do, Tom. In fact, our lives are those novels that we write “for” them. I say this knowing that I will publish a novel about my own “Julia” some day, no matter what else I do with the rest of my life. Worse, women know when they have us in their greedy little hands, not to mention the part of us that they are holding and squeezing.
Mr. Smith is a genuine wit and not just a gag writer. And there is often a dangerous sadness hidden behind the best humor, so that beneath the surface of the humorist, you will usually find a dreamer and disappointed lover. Think of Oscar Wilde in “De Profundis” or any of Shaw’s political plays – not surprisingly, both playwrights were Irish. Mr. Smith’s writing, at its best, brings to mind the inventiveness of the early novels of Martin Amis and vintage Gore Vidal. This is the first novel that I have read in a long time that contains a lengthy conversation between a man and his penis. In my own chats with my “love monkey” – who speaks with a British accent and, for some reason, sounds a lot like Richard Burton! – I rarely get the best lines. Few men do because we know which of us is in charge.
Yes sir, Mr. Smith has found a reader in me, despite being a Yalie.
In the interests of full disclosure it should be noted that Tom and I wear the same size Oxford loafers (9, 1/2) and that neither of us would be described as “tall” unless we were “beverages at Starbucks.” Yet we cope. We struggle along. We live with the pain. We even welcome it into our lives, in fact, because that’s just the kind of guys that we are: tough, resilient, brave, endowed with courage, which must be understood as Hemingway defined it, “grace under pressure.”
If only we were as quick and adept at evading danger as Bugs Bunny, then we’d have it made with the women – except that most of us will always feel a bit more like Elmer Fudd, whenever those “mysterious green eyes” are pointed at us by that one blonde who captures the female lead in our lives early on and never lets go.