Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

Overview

"Hilariously funny…Lydia Millet’s novels raise the bar for boldness." —Rene Steinke, New York Times Book Review

In this “comic masterpiece” (Salon), honeymooners Deb and Chip—our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband—befriend a marine biologist who discovers mermaids in a coral reef. As a resort chain swoops in to exploit the shy creatures, the newlyweds unite with other adventurous vacationers to stop the company from turning the reef into a theme park. Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet’s most fun book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351729
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

This is Lydia Millet’s third story collection. Her first, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; her second, Fight No More (2018), won an American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award.

Editorial Reviews

"A romp with sharp teeth…a slapstick variation on Millet’s abiding theme: the relationship between human beings and the natural world."

Salon - Laura Miller

"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."

Jenny Offill

"A hilarious genre-bender that strikes some serious chords."

BBC - Jane Ciabattari

"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."

Karen Russell

"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.

"A bridal shower features frilly underwear to make the new wife look like a prostitute; a baby shower peddles frilly bonnets you drape around a newborn's face to make it look less like a garden gnome," Deb observes. Because she nixed Chip's idea of a honeymoon cruise (also volcano bicycle camping and a tour of Himalayan monasteries), Chip and Deb wind up in a swanky beach resort in the British Virgin Islands. Deb wants lounge chairs and frilly drinks. Chip, meanwhile, an avid video gamer, longs for real- life adventures.

Advantage Chip when, on a snorkeling expedition with Nancy, a marine biologist who is besotted with the parrotfish, he and Deb see a pod of mermaids. Here's Deb, on a break from her compulsive quipping, giving us a glimpse of the mythic creatures, and of her own more serious self:

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.

Still, Millet's a fine writer with a keen eye and a swift rabbit punch. It's a joy to read as, with precise jabs, she has Deb send up science skeptics, extreme sports, quinoa, SUVs ("The Hummer bounced over potholes, leaving behind an invisible stream of global warming . . . "), cosmetic dentistry, Twitter, foot fetishists, and just about any of-the-moment hipster notion that's the least bit precious or self-involved. Half the time this means Deb is skewering herself, and you like her even more.

You're rewarded as well each time Deb drops her schtick and gets serious. Here she is, echoing one of the themes that runs through all of Millet's writing, the uncertain future of this fragile world:

. . . 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
Absurdity and paranoia permeate the latest novel from Millet (Pulitzer Prize finalist for Love in Infant Monkeys). The book follows a newlywed couple on their honeymoon at a resort in the Caribbean. Deb and Chip embody the modern American dream: they float above life, buoyed by career success, good looks, and booze. A couple of days into their vacation, a marine biologist, Nancy, disrupts their getaway when she chances upon a group of mermaids in the resort’s coral reef. After dispelling initial doubts, Nancy insists that the small crew that found the “mer” (politically correct nomenclature is key) proceeds with caution. She fears that if the information is leaked, hoards of reporters will descend on the island, endangering the mermaids and their reef home. Panic ensues when Nancy dies the following day in a suspicious drowning incident, and soon after media teams and soldiers flood the island. The original snorkel crew (Deb, Chip, a Freudian scholar, a Japanese VJ, a jaded academic) brainstorms how to save the mythical creatures—namely with videos, social media, and celebrity connections. In an era of uncharted connectivity, Millet comically deflates clear-cut distinctions between truth, fiction, and moral high ground. With equal parts calculated wryness and pleading earnestness, she delivers a thrilling piece of fabulist fiction. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2014-07-21
A Caribbean honeymoon turns into a media circus over a mermaid sighting in this laser-focused satire from Millet (Magnificence, 2012, etc.). Deborah, the narrator of Millet's smart and funny novel, her ninth, is an LA woman who's snarky to the core: She's skeptical of her fiance's hard-core workout regimen, of the rituals of bachelorette parties, even of her best friend's own snark. So when her new husband, Chip, proposes a honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands, she's suspicious of tourism's virtues. Deb's early interactions seem to justify her defensiveness: One man gets the wrong idea when she accidentally brushes her foot against his leg over drinks: "He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes," she tells her husband. "Like my toes, Chip, were dolled up in Frederick's of Hollywood." The comic, unbelieving tone Millet gives Deb helps sell what happens next: Roped into a scuba dive by an aquatic researcher, she and a small group spot a bunch of mermaids at a nearby reef. Despite the group's efforts to keep the discovery hidden, the resort gets the news and rushes to capitalize on it, while Deb and her cohorts are eager to preserve the sole example of unadulterated wonder the 21st century has offered them. The novel has the shape and pace of a thriller—Deb is held by corporate goons, the researcher goes mysteriously missing, paramilitary men are called in—and it thrives on Deb's witty, wise narration. Millet means to criticize a rapacious culture that wants to simplify and categorize everything, from the resort profiteers to churchy types who see the mermaids as symbols of godlessness. The ending underscores the consequences of such blinkered mindsets without losing its essential comedy. An admirable example of a funny novel with a serious message that works swimmingly. Dive in.

Kirkus Reviews