Really Rosie Monkeys

By R.Z. Sheppard

The monkeys are the seven Vincent children: Caitlin, Sophie, Delilah, Gus Jr., Sherman, Chicky and Minnie, the youngest. Their father, Augustus Paine Vincent, a banker and yacht-club member, has the low profile of old-line Boston. He is the weak silent type and a heavy drinker. His wife, and mother of the brood, is the former Rose Marie O'Dare, Irish Catholic and a fine choice. One suspects that the Vincent bloodline had thinned since the days of the vigorous Yankee traders and that Rose Marie brought an unaffected vitality to the clan. She makes babies as easily as some people make friends; she revels in runny noses and dropped socks. Mothering is her natural passion. At 40 she nurses her new infant as the other children look on: "They watched her unbutton the nightgown and feel inside for the bosom. After fixing it to the baby mouth, and satisfied with it, she looked up. Caitlin and Sophie saw it --that wild look--only this time there was something added. It was aimed at them and it said: There is nothing in the world compares with this."

Susan Minot's first novel is a way to understand the familial instinct at a ^ time when young women have other demands made on their minds and bodies. The point of view is largely that of Sophie, the second daughter, who coolly focuses on incidents that span some dozen years. The book is in nine episodes that could be, with minor adjustments, independent stories. "Hiding," the opening section, locates the emotional poles of the Vincent family. With a mischievous "hee hee hee," Rosie crams herself and her children into a huge linen closet. The point is to play a trick on Daddy, but Daddy won't play. He returns home and, finding no one about, simply sits down to watch a football game on TV. Here and elsewhere, he is like an inconveniently placed piece of furniture. Yet he is not without a saving gracelessness. Drunk at a dinner party, he puts his head on his place mat and groans, "This is so boring."

Father's melancholy and Mother's sunny disposition determine the weather that pervades the book. It breaks over the breakfast table, at Thanksgiving dinner and during vacations at the family's summer house in Maine. Time takes big jumps, and each episode finds the Vincents older. The girls begin dating, smoking and drinking, and the boys start sneaking off for marijuana nightcaps. Dad grows increasingly predictable ("nothing more normal than for him to be standing in the shade at a family picnic holding a can of beer"), and then Mother is dead.

The bad news is conveyed casually. In one chapter we are gunkholing with all the Vincents in their motorboat, and in the next an indeterminate amount of time has passed, and we learn that Rosie was killed when a train hit her car. It is an effective narrative trick that Minot might have learned from John Irving, who could have got it from Evelyn Waugh. Like them, Minot also knows how to blend the touching and the macabre. Monkeys ends with the Vincents each taking a handful of Rosie's ashes ("rounded and porous, like little ruins") and

scattering them in the channel that flows past their summer house. The event

requires a double take because it ap-

pears at first glance that the fam- ily is posing for the Lands' End catalog. Saying goodbye to Rosie is a scene not quickly forgotten, executed by a gifted writer whose debut cannot easily be ignored.