"Mermaids in Paradise makes brilliant comedy out of a honeymoon trip that veers from the absurd to the sublime and back again. Lydia Millet is a stone-cold genius."
"A hilarious genre-bender that strikes some serious chords."
"Lydia Millet is the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves."
Chicago Tribune - Charles Finch
"A writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious."
"Millet, with her keen sense of the absurd, brings the book to a surprising conclusion, and makes a point about corporate greed and the destruction of the environment without being heavy-handed."
Wall Street Journal - Moira Hodgson
"Suspenseful, philosophical, and tropical—the funniest you’ll ever read on ecotourism and the wisest you’ll ever read on mermaids."
O Magazine - Natalie Beach
"[A] deft satire."
Entertainment Weekly - Melissa Maerz
Before we get into how funny Lydia Millet's novel is, funny and tart and yes, with a bit of a wobble, can we talk about the cover? A Vargas Girl mermaid smiles up at the reader while doing a shoulder stand. Her lips are retro red, her chemise hints at lingerie, and her tail is held aloft at a jaunty angle. It's an arresting image that grabs your gaze and makes you wonder: What's going on? Good question, for the book as well as the cover. Mermaids in Paradise opens as Deb and Chip, a privileged young couple from Southern California, are about to get married. Deb's the narrator, lively and opinionated, the sting of her mordant wit softened by her sunny demeanor. She and Chip met on a speed date, then fell in love on a real date later that evening. Now they're engaged and about to run the gauntlet of the American wedding machine, a target at which Deb takes gleeful aim.
Their hair floated in clouds behind them, long, weightless-looking swaths, like seaweed, as did their tails, which moved up and down slowly as the tails of dolphins move, not side to side like the tails of fish. These tails were graceful, beautiful muscles, scales shining silver in rows and rows of small coins. Nancy cooks up a plan to protect their amazing find, which backfires spectacularly. Overnight Nancy has gone missing and the island is overrun by crazed hordes, all rushing to capture and monetize the mermaids. As murder, imprisonment, kidnappings, and betrayals pile up in short order, Millet's novel, until now a sleek and gleeful satire, starts to stagger under the weight of farce. The chatty meandering tone that has served as a showcase for Deb's hilarious asides and observations turns to quicksand. No matter how antic and zany the complications faced by Deb and Chip, who are now eco-warriors in the save-the-mermaids cause, the effect is muted chaos. . . . it had taken our ancestors four million years to figure out fire. It took them another five million years to develop writing. And then, in a great acceleration — just a brief, screaming handful of seasons — we got electricity, nukes, commercial air travel, trips to the moon. Overnight the white sands of the parrotfish were running out. Here went the poles, melting, and here, at last, went paradise. Grace notes like these are there to relish and reread, even as they offer up a vision of the future that guts you. So by the time the plot teeters to its climax and the mermaids' fate gets decided in a monster plot twist that arrives, quite literally, out of the blue, you're as taken with the idea of what this action/parody/eco- thriller/comedy mash-up of a book could have been as by what's actually on the page. Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles–based journalist, essayist, and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later. Reviewer: Veronique de Turenne
★ 08/11/2014
★ 2014-07-21
