Animal Acts: A Novel

Steven and Linda Morris have an ideal marriage: intimate, open, collegial, comfortable. They have known each other as lovers and friends long enough to raise three children, to settle boundaries, to accumulate things.
Steven has fallen asleep with The New Yorker rising and falling on the shores of his chest. It is our marriage, that magazine, with all its richness of things, its collections of culture, fur coats, pearls, four-star hotels, and the stories, mostly the stories, in which, as in our marriage, nothing happens. . . . We've talked about the magazine, almost talking about our lives. "Why would you want anything to happen in a story? Why would you want change?" he'd ask.
Change was the enemy. . . . But something disturbed. Something out there rattled in the cornstalks, something I feared so deeply I was afraid to sleep on my own balcony at night. . . . And I was well aware that that something was, somehow, my self.
Linda Morris is about to make a major change in her life. She is about to leave her best friend, who is her husband, and to leave her lover, who just may be a contract killer and who is, she suspects, out to kill her, contract or no. She is about to run away with a gorilla.
Animal Acts is a quest novel unlike any we have seen before. On the surface, it is an antic tale for our times, the story of a woman of a certain age who runs away from her perfect husband and her dangerous lover only to find that she has unintentionally run away with a full-grown gorilla. On a deeper level, it is an exploration of the human-animal bond: Beginning as a search for self-consciousness, it ends in animal consciousness. En route, it puts a controversial spin on evolutionary theory, producing what can only be called the inevitable next stage in the gender wars. And through it all, Rhoda Lerman - magician, conjuror, word-juggler - persuades us along her manic path.

Justly known as a writer's writer, Lerman produces fascinating plots and lush, seductive prose in the service of transcendent questions. Her sixth novel (after God's Ear ) is a tour de force in which a wealthy Long Island woman embarks on a physical and spiritual odyssey of self-discovery--with a gorilla. Taut and darkly suspenseful, it is also a thesis on the way men and women think, feel, and decode the world. When Linda Morris impulsively decides to leave her unresponsive husband and her menacing British lover, she has no idea that the van she takes from the garage contains a gorilla her husband has rented from an amusement park. Initially vowing to jettison the animal, whose name is Max, she instead watches him kill a brutal keeper, becomes embroiled in a desperate plan to shield him from the authorities, and begins a hazardous journey to Florida, where Max can be spirited out of the country to safety. Max is an immensely appealing character; and feisty, wisecracking Linda offers ruminations about gender differences that are barbed and poignant. Lerman's writing has a sweetness and a desperation that sharpen her piquant questions about human existence, the ways she delineates the stresses of contemporary marriage and the workings of a woman's heart. Yet her device of having Linda's husband and lover carry on dialogues inside her head is lumbersome, and her gothic imagination can wear thin when it veers into the mystic. This novel may not be for everyone, but those who love it will be fierce in its praise.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Put this in the ``We haven't seen this topic before'' category: A woman finds herself only after she leaves her husband and her lover for a gorilla. Linda Morris is not happy: ``Whenever I felt I could no longer bear another moment of my marriage I would imagine my husband's funeral....'' In fact, Linda loves her affluent, entrepreneurial husband, Steven, but their relationship survives because they never probe it too deeply. For excitement, Linda has a lover she doesn't even like named John Banks, who may be an assassin. Linda's real problem? No self-identity. One night, Linda and Steven lie in bed discussing his most recent investment--a Coney Island horror house with a Rent-A-Pet gorilla. Suddenly, Linda can no longer face him, or John, or not knowing herself. She sneaks away in their old Suburban only to find her escape complicated by Moses the Rent-A- Pet in the back. The next morning she tries dropping the gorilla at the horror house, but Moses kills, in self-defense, the old carny in charge, and Linda can't bear to see him die at the hands of the authorities. So she embarks on a quest to smuggle him to Florida, where he can be shipped abroad. Many follow her: Steven, who has turned very ugly; John, who may prefer to see her dead than to see her get away; and hordes of fortune hunters who recognize Moses' resale value. Throughout this adventure, Linda and Moses forge an unusual bond that reveals her courage, sensuality, and strength, and justifies Linda's musings on the origins of life. If it seems obvious that gorilla would represent man, Lerman (God's Ear, 1989, etc.) creates a very different and refreshing metaphor via which Linda saving Moses means saving herself. Wry, beautiful, hilarious, brave. A little didactic when Lerman talks about men and women as different species, but not enough to weigh down this otherwise effortlessly profound tale. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Linda Morris feels trapped by her life as a Long Island suburban housewife with a lover tucked away in Ireland. When she impulsively leaves her husband one night, Linda is astonished to discover that she's acquired a rather odd traveling companion: an elderly, asthmatic gorilla. Unfortunately, the gorilla kills a man while she watches. What follows is an unusual plot that alternates between Linda's introspective search for her primordial self and a fast-paced action novel. Linda tries to save the gorilla, Moses, from death at the hands of a number of adversaries. Readers must pay close attention to narration that moves imperceptibly between reality and Linda's imagination, as when she conjures up scenarios for her husband's funeral. This offbeat tale by the author of The Book of the Night ( LJ 8/84) is not your usual love story. Recommended for general collections.
- Heather Blenkinsopp, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lerman is regarded as an inventive, feminist, and even theological novelist, adjectives that accurately describe her latest venture. The most appealing aspect of this tongue-in-cheek mythopoeic quest tale is the way Lerman gives equal weight to the action and to her heroine's fantasies. Linda is wealthy and multiorgasmic but cosmically unhappy. Her husband is more brother than mate, while her enigmatic lover is either a shrink living out his macho fantasies or an honest-to-God assassin. But Linda seems to love her dog most of all, believing that animals somehow embody the meaning of the universe. She gets a chance to test this theory when she leaves her husband and home in the middle of the night, only to discover a rented gorilla in her van. When Linda tries to return Moses, a gentle giant trained to entertain but lethal when provoked, things get out of hand, and soon Linda and Moses are fugitives. During their perilous journey, they achieve a back-to-the-garden sort of intimacy, {…}a la Dian Fossey, and Linda comes to believe that women and men are actually separate species. This is a cleverly provocative satire by an author who excels at physical description, slapstick, and pointed mystical speculation. Donna Seaman