Still Life with Monkey

Starred review from September 24, 2018
Weber’s brilliant novel (following The Memory of All That) follows married couple Duncan and Laura Wheeler as their lives are altered after a car accident—with Duncan at the wheel—leaves him a paraplegic and results in the death of his architect protégé. Laura, an art conservator, painstakingly analyzes cracked ceramic antiques and makes damaged classic paintings whole, and now has to contend with a husband who has lost his verve and motivation. Duncan’s identical twin, Gordon, has lived with various limitations all his life—he is mentally slow and has speech impediments—and Duncan has been his caretaker from afar, always making sure he eats, gets washed, and keeps his job at a bookstore. Now Gordon is the one who cares for Duncan, checking in on him to make sure he’s doing all right. When Laura learns about trained, dexterous capuchin monkeys who assist paralyzed people, she arranges for one to be brought to their home. As the comical creature touchingly becomes part of the family against the backdrop of Laura’s determined optimism and Duncan’s depression and humiliation over being forever dependent, the author explores questions about quality of life, the drive to be productive, and sacrifices born from a depth of love. Weber’s unsentimental and poignant examination of what does and does not make life worth living is a heartbreaking triumph.

August 1, 2018
Duncan Wheeler's life can be neatly divided into before and after the car accident that left him in a wheelchair and his young prot�g� dead. A wildly successful, if no longer inspired, architect, Duncan is in despair and full of guilt as the driver of the car, prompting his wife, Laura, to insist on having a helper monkey. A middle-aged veteran of the Primate Institute of New England, Ottoline quickly acclimates and immediately begins to change the dynamics of the Wheelers' relationship. Weber's (The Memory of All That?, 2011) sixth novel is a nuanced investigation of what is left when all of the ways one identifies oneself are wiped out in an instant. As the story jumps back and forward along Duncan's time line and among the varying perspectives of Duncan, Laura, and Duncan's twin brother, Gordon, along with case files at the Primate Institute, the picture that emerges is devastating in its clarity. Although Ottoline improves the quality of Duncan's life, his actual outlook is an evolving mystery readers grapple with until the final pages. Beautiful, emotionally resonant storytelling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 15, 2018
An architect and his wife grapple with the aftermath of a catastrophic accident in Weber's sixth novel (True Confections, 2009, etc.).Duncan is left with a spinal injury after his car is broadsided by an 18-wheeler on the way back from one of the custom homes for wealthy clients that are his firm's bread and butter. Wheelchair-bound and with the use of only one weak hand, he sinks into a suicidal depression his wife, Laura, hopes will be alleviated by Ottoline, a "monkey helper" trained to perform simple manual tasks he once took for granted. Duncan does develop a bond with Ottoline, and Weber captures in amusing detail her charged interactions with Laura, viewed as a rival for their alpha male. Overall, however, the tone is dark; Duncan broods over Todd, the apprentice architect who died in the crash, and he remains angrily uncooperative with Laura's attempts to construct a new normal in their changed lives. Weber elucidates both spouses' struggles in a tough-minded narrative studded with the shrewd, not especially charitable observations that are her trademark. Twenty-five-year-old Todd is nailed with the comment, "As was true of so many of his generation, [he] thought he was entirely original in all of his gentleman hobo hipster choices"; a partner in Duncan's firm is dismissed as "secretly convinced of his own superiority...he always looked as if he had just returned from a safari or an ice-climbing expedition." There are also tender moments between Duncan and his "tentative, unambitious" twin, Gordon, and a poignant episode when Laura finds and frames the one truly original design Duncan completed in architecture school before settling for a career doing "highly adequate and entirely unremarkable work." Missed chances, like the baby the couple failed to conceive, jostle painful acknowledgments of underappreciated pleasures now denied Duncan, like gardening and cooking. His catalog of everything he has lost and his belated acknowledgment of the burden Laura has also borne form the keening climax to this stark and compelling novel.Rigorously unsentimental yet suffused with emotion: possibly the best work yet from an always stimulating writer.

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