Pete and his wife Leigh soon added Benjamin to their duo there, and I got to know Ben as a very tiny creature who - perhaps like Bruno - has evolved more than a little. Pete, in fact, introduced me to The Hobbit, The Whole Earth Catalogue, Buckminster Fuller's writings, and a host of other things that I might have overlooked due to my hillbilly ways.īut we parted our 'redneck' ways when we quit those days and left Salem High School, only to meet up again several years later when the two of us both wound up in the San Francisco Bay Area at the same time.
His father Pete - who seems to prefer "Charley" these days - grew up with me in the Ozarks, just a year behind me in school, and the two of us spent a lot of time running around together and reading the same books. Spike Jonze would make this sing.My right to write on this novel that I haven't (yet) read is grounded in the fact that I knew Mr. Perversely, I really want to see this adapted for cinema. I loved the book but I wanted more whimsy. If I’m not mistaken, I also caught references to The Twilight Zone and (perhaps) Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. Planet of the Apes is there, of course, but also and mostly, Pinocchio (for who is Leon Smoler, Bruno’s best friend, if not a present-day Stromboli?). Hale, as a writer, delights in allusions to great works of literature and popular culture, throughout. And this central narrative owes much, I think, to Nabokov. For, that love is decidedly not unrequited. The hardest leap for any reader, though, comes with the story of Bruno’s love for Lydia, the scientist (partly modeled on primatologist Jane Goodall) who rescued him from the Lincoln Park Zoo. Bruno, himself, would care little about how many readers he reached so long as the ones he did enjoyed the show.
This, of course, will limit the novel’s appeal to a wider audience. But, only if you have the lexicon to keep pace. It is beautifully written, the words streaming through your head, gently, in time. The book, itself, treats language as a commodity. Learning to think is a process, after all.
Language as grace. It is not about the moment Bruno becomes self-aware (through language) but about the process of becoming self aware (through words, words, words). What it’s like to be an alien in a world of men.Īnd, all that’s there, in some form.
Some cross-country journey from the point of view of the world’s first speaking chimpanzee. What I imaged and hoped for was an adventure story in the vein of Conquest for the Planet of the Apes or something. A memoir about love and murder as told by a chimp? Yes, please, I thought when I first heard about Benjamin Hale’s debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.
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