In reviewing this collection of short stories, I’m tempted to type the 10 words, “Lydia Millet is the greatest American author of her generation” 50 times to fill up this space and just be done with it. In reality, however, I am paid to justify things beyond giddy fandom and, I’ll admit it, professional jealousy.

Just as you realize that she is writing about Madonna Ciccone in the opening story “Sexing the Pheasant,” Millet has, with her economical eloquence, already set up everything needed for a consonant arc (a superficial woman shoots a pheasant and confronts death, superficially, on her superficially British estate) as well as the common theme of the collection: encounters between celebrities and animals based loosely on factual accounts. It’s a perfect collision point to study human vanity imposing itself on nature.

This is why Millet is the greatest American author of her generation. She breaks rules by turning author polemic into poetry while at the same time allowing the kind of characters most writers wouldn’t touch to own the stories outright.

Witness her capturing Madonna’s charming crudity and blitheness in service of the story: “The best fags were all English fags,” Madonna broods. “Englishmen were the Ur-faggots, pretty much. All other fags in the world were pale imitations of real English fags. This was the land of homos; even the straight men were fags here. One reason she liked it so much. In the US guys were basically rapists.”

Stories like “Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit” and  “Chomsky, Rodents” (Noam Chomsky pitching a hamster condo at a dump frequented by Cape Cod intellectuals) feature their famous subjects as protagonists, yet when Millet moves away from star power her writing really gets under the skin. “Sir Henry,” a tale of a dog walker in the employ of David Hasselhoff, is a subtly unnerving and wrenching day-in-the-life of a person charged with giving four-legged fulfillment to C-list celebrity ornaments.

At her best, Millet is a writer of ecologies, both traditional and, in Love In Infant Monkeys, cultural. Many creative-writing-grad types will tell you to avoid using fiction to explore big ideas but a more specific warning should be to avoid only certain overdone big ideas. Millet’s big ideas are always starting points that allow good writing to follow, naturally.

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