Have you ever woken up on Thanksgiving morning to a house full of company and just wanted to flee? In Mischa Berlinski’s extravagantly brilliant and darkly funny new novel, “Mona Acts Out,” the eponymous heroine does just that.
Mona Zahid, a celebrated stage actor, has a lot on her mind. She is worried that her surgeon husband, Phil, may be cheating on her. She, in turn, wonders whether she should cheat on him with a sexy former lover who has been cast opposite her in an upcoming production of “Antony and Cleopatra.”
She also worries about her college-age niece, Rachel, whose mother — Mona’s beloved sister, Zahra — has recently died, and who, as a high school intern, was instrumental in bringing about the downfall of Mona’s mentor, Milton Katz, legendary founder of an off-Broadway theater company.
Most of all, she worries about whether she even has the chops to play Cleopatra — in her opinion, the toughest role in Shakespeare, even harder than Hamlet. All this toil and trouble comes to a head on Thanksgiving morning when, under the influence of Zahra’s leftover pain pills and some very strong cannabis oil, Mona sets out to visit the disgraced Katz, who may or may not be dying.
Over the next 24 hours, Mona will stop at the neighborhood Whole Foods to buy parsley, the pretext she used to escape her family. She will cross Central Park, fuel up on caffeine at a Starbucks, and wind up at the apartment of the beautiful younger actress who, a long time ago, displaced her as the object of Katz’s lecherous affection.
Finally, she will journey across the river to the Brooklyn townhouse where Katz has been living in exile from the theater world with his good-natured, eccentric Polish housekeeper. The whole time, Mona will be accompanied by her winsome beagle, Barney, one of the best dogs in recent American fiction.
Berlinski, the author of “Fieldwork,” a National Book Award finalist, has written a tour de force of a novel. Read it for its utterly convincing portrayal of female sexual desire. For its nuanced depiction of the aftermath of #MeToo, including the generational differences between Mona’s middle-age cohort and younger women like Rachel who, in real life, brought down Harvey Weinstein and so many others. But most of all, read it for Berlinski’s dazzling insights into how Shakespeare offers us mere mortals a playbook for every season of life.
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