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Summary
Summary
Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys -- and most affecting love stories -- in recent literature. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, loud, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and amazingly accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human -- to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.
Author Notes
Benjamin Hale is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he received a Provost's Fellowship to complete his novel, which also went on to win a Michener-Copernicus Award. He has been a night shift baker, a security guard, a trompe l'oeil painter, a pizza deliverer, a cartoonist, an illustrator and a technical writer. He grew up in Colorado and now lives in New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An enlightened chimp goes on the wildest adventure since Every Which Way but Loose in Hale's mischievous debut. Bruno Littlemore, the narrator chimp, eventually lands in a research lab at the University of Chicago, where he falls in love with Dr. Lydia Littlemore, who, shortly after hearing Bruno speak his name, takes him first to her apartment (sex is had, much later) and later to the quietude of a Colorado ranch owned by a couple of odd animal rights advocates. It is in this environment that Bruno becomes a fully articulate and artistic being, but the idyll does not last: Lydia falls ill, and Bruno is captured, escapes, ends up in New York City, and befriends a dreamer named Leon with whom he mounts a performance of The Tempest before being forced by circumstance to return, tragically, to Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. Bruno, having mastered speech, is quite happy to play with this new toy, going on philosophical riffs and speaking at length about art, and while his monologues are less tedious than you'd imagine, it's his quest for answers about the agonizing dilemmas of existence that is unexpectedly resonant. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this account by a chimpanzee who ascends the evolutionary ladder, first-time novelist Hale explores what it means to be human. Nine years into captivity after committing a murder, Bruno 24 years old, hairless, with his spine straightened by bipedal standing, and his surgically fashioned, humanoid nose dictates his memoirs, having become proficient at speech, reading, and visual arts. His first name was given to him at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo where he was born, his second is taken by him from researcher Dr. Lydia Littlemore, who tests him and with whom he comes to share a home and a deep, and eventually sexual, love. Motivated by his love for Lydia and language, Bruno soon lives and functions as a human, becoming an assault on those who consider humans unique; his blissful relationship with Lydia spawns hatred. Like his protagonist, Hale clearly loves language, using words with precision (likely to send readers to a dictionary) and for play, as when Lydia, when happy, chortled up the engine to start her car. With its exuberantly detailed sex between species and its concept that human cognizance of death leads to superstition and religion, this novel is likely to offend some readers, while others will find it holds a remarkable, riotous mirror to mankind.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
VLADIMIR NABOKOV claimed that the "initial shiver of inspiration" for "Lolita" came from a newspaper account of an ape in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris that produced the first drawing ever made by an animal. "This sketch," he reported, "showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." The story neatly encapsulates the tragedy and comedy of Humbert Humbert: for all his preternatural brilliance - no one of his kind has ever set such things down on a page - he knows less than nothing because he doesn't know that a world exists outside himself. The narrator of Benjamin Hale's first novel, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore," has some of Humbert's erudition and much of his arrogance. Like Humbert, he is imprisoned for a murder he can't bring himself to regret, and like Humbert's, his confession is far less concerned with that act than with the scandalous love affair that precipitated it. The difference is that Bruno knows he is trapped, for he has "seen this cage from both within and without." Also, Bruno is an actual ape. Specifically, he is a chimpanzee, raised in the primate house at the Lincoln Park Zoo and then, after his unusual intelligence is discovered, in the University of Chicago's Behavioral Biology Laboratory. There he learns the ways and eventually the words of Homo sapiens, beginning with the nod, the head shake and the wave. "With these three signs," Bruno notes, "you can say to anyone yes, no, harm, no harm, hello and goodbye. Add to these the smile, the frown and the finger point, and you're practically already in basic-human-social-interaction business." As this remark suggests, Bruno becomes in time a master of said business, He owes much of this evolution - which he recognizes for the mixed blessing it is - to Lydia Littlemore, the primatologist who first discovers his talents and from whom he takes his last name. Bruno's "crazy, disastrous love" for Lydia condemns him to a life spent "running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods." That we are all trapped in this "state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness, nor ever reaching the light," is one lesson of Hale's novel, which is partly about the danger of Promethean knowledge. It's also about language, education and man's inhumanity to man and beast alike. For good measure, the novel comprises a kind of compendium of the literature of enculturated primates, from Kafka (Bruno's father is named Rotpeter, after the narrator-ape of "A Report to an Academy") to Curious George (Rotpeter is taken from the jungle by "a man in a big yellow hat"). In fact, Hale's novel is so stuffed with allusions high and low, so rich with philosophical and literary interest, that a reviewer risks making it sound ponderous or unwelcoming. So let's get this out of the way: "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" is an absolute pleasure. Much of its pleasure comes from the book's voice. "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," Humbert tells us, and Bruno certainly obliges. There is a Bellovian exuberance befitting a Chicago-born autodidact. (Bruno calls himself "the chimp of the perverse" and labels a preverbal exchange of grunts and shrieks a "nonversation.") Every first-person narrator creates himself out of words, but this process is particularly acute in Bruno's case, since possession of language is the only thing that qualifies him for human consideration, especially after acts of violence for which he would otherwise be put down. Like Scheherazade, he tells his story in order to stay his execution. There's also great pleasure in the audacity of the story itself. "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" announces that Benjamin Hale is himself fully evolved as a writer, taking on big themes, intent on fitting the world into his work. Hale's daring is most obvious in his portrayal of the relationship between Bruno and Lydia, which eventually breaks the one sexual taboo even Nabokov wouldn't touch. Such material will prove an insurmountable barrier to certain readers, the same ones who will never pick up "Lolita." And the depictions of interspecies love are certainly discomfiting, but not for the reasons you might imagine. Ultimately, the point of these scenes is not to shock us but to ask what fundamentally makes us human, what differences inhere between a creature like Lydia and a creature like Bruno that disqualify the latter from the full range of human affection. In a twist that sounds heavy-handed when summarized but is expertly managed, Lydia suffers an illness that leaves her helpless and aphasic, reduced to her animal self, making the differences between the two seem even more superficial, and their need for each other even more moving. AFTER his relationship with Lydia is discovered, Bruno escapes the ensuing scandal and is set loose in the world. The narrative briefly flags as the book turns from a sentimental education to a broad picaresque. It seems that Hale's ambition, his desire to get every kind of book into these pages, will be his undoing. But the novel is saved when Bruno comes back to Chicago, leading to the climactic scenes that will return him to confinement. The reader knows this return is inevitable, and so does Bruno. "If we think of the whole world as a prison," he concludes, "then there's no such thing as a cage-free animal." Christopher R. Beha is an editor at Harper's Magazine and the author of a memoir, "The Whole Five Feet."
Kirkus Review
So, a chimp walks into a bar...Literally. At least in Hale's debut novel, whose protagonist is a chimp who, among other things, does not disdain a stiff drink or three, or even "a quadruple Scotch on the rocks, please," the aftermath of which merits ejection from a Chicago bar and a dejected walk to the apehouse down the road. Bruno is a chimp of parts: He has a knack for painting, and, he grouses, "the research center generously provides me with paints, brushes, canvases, etc." so that he can make a fortune for the place through the sales of what, after all, are a fairly scarce commodityworks of art produced by a simian other than Homo sapiens. Bruno plays backgammon, thinks philosophical thoughts, wanders the woods in Thoreauvian splendor and generally has a fairly good time of it, even though he technically is an inmate, confined on account of a rather spectacular crime he committed, one that Hale unveils only after many hundreds of pages. The notion of a learned nonhuman primate is not entirely novel; Aldous Huxley played with it in Ape and Essence, and another denizen of Chicago, Laurence Gonzales, recently did magic with it in his novel Lucy. But Hale's Bruno is smart and inclined to archness and irony, and it's a pleasure to follow his thoughts, darkling and otherwise, save for those all-too-frequent moments when Hale comes over all cute ("Cyrano de Bruno" indeed). The novel requires heaping suspensions of disbelief for those unaccustomed to the premise that a chimpanzee can write a love letter while thinking snotty thoughts about its less talented cousins, "naked, hairy animals, unenlightened, ungifted with speech." They have a word down at Tea Party central for such a critter: Elitist. And Bruno would probably cop to it, too.A less splendid debut than the hype would suggest, but a book of considerable merit all the sameand of high entertainment value, too, as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Our evolutionary understanding of language is deeply rooted in the study of genetics; the few genes present in humans but lacking in chimpanzees are thought to be responsible for language. However, Hale's debut novel (winner of the Michener--Copernicus Award) forces us to reconsider our linguistic abilities in terms of love. Written as the memoir of the world's first speaking chimpanzee, Bruno, the story follows the extraordinary chimp from language acquisition to his eventual imprisonment. Highly intelligent and articulate, Bruno has an ever-expanding vocabulary dwarfed only by his love for the university primatologist. This is a love story. In his exploration of communication, Hale deconstructs human language within a larger continuum of communicative processes universally shared among all living beings. As a corollary, readers should be prepared to suspend willingly the artificial boundaries and taboos that exist between the species. VERDICT An ambitious, enjoyable, and lengthy debut novel; much will be written about its more controversial aspects, but Hale's prowess as a storyteller should not be ignored. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/10.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
