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Outrageous romp fails to hit home
By Leah Hager Cohen |
September 5, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
EARLY in Sara Gruen's new novel, "Ape House," one of the characters gives a mini-lesson on American Sign Language, which, she instructs, "is not simply signed English ? it's a unique language, with a unique syntax." Instead of saying, "Yesterday I ate cherries," for example, this character explains that in ASL you might sign, "Day-past eat cherries me."
A few pages later, that same character is described as using spoken English and ASL "simultaneously." It shouldn't take a linguist to recognize that such a task is well nigh impossible. Any careful reader might guess that expressing oneself in two languages at the same time, when each employs different word order, simply wouldn't work. And it does not. (Disclosure: I've worked as an ASL interpreter.)
A minor quibble, yet it raises questions about the author's relationship to the other research-based aspects of the story. And in a book that asks us to care about complex ethical and scientific concerns, such questions matter. Gruen, the author of three other novels, including "Water for Elephants," turns her attention here to the world of six bonobos and the humans who conduct language studies with them at the fictional Great Ape Language Lab in Kansas (evidently based on the real-life Great Ape Trust in Iowa, which Gruen visited).
The first several chapters give a taste of the vast sweep of issues the novel will address: the potential for and implications of inter-species communication; the varieties and uses of sexual contact, both among humans and among the other primates; family dynamics and dysfunction; the abduction and enslavement of animals for scientific research; the crass obtuseness of pop culture; the very notion of what constitutes humanity and the humane.
Gruen heaps her topical platter high and wastes no time digging in. There is a voracious quality to her storytelling, a dogged delight in excess, and whatever a more contemplative thinker or a sharper satirist might have done with the subject matter, their methods are not hers.
"Ape House" is a busy book, crammed with locations, characters, character types, and the kind of Amazing Coincidences and Surprise Twists that would do Dickens proud.
Gruen appears never to have met a plot point she didn't like, the more outrageous the better, and a glittering plethora of these pile up to keep the novel pitching forward.
The main characters are Isabel Duncan, a scientist working with the bonobos, and John Thigpen, a down-on-his-luck journalist. Initially sent to report on work being done at the language lab, Thigpen winds up covering the increasingly bizarre series of events that unfold when the lab is bombed and the animals disappear ? only to resurface on a reality TV show called "Ape House" (subtitles allow viewers to understand what the bonobos are signing).
Duncan, badly injured in the bombing and frantic to reunite with her research subjects, whom she thinks of as "family," teams with Thigpen to find out who did it and rescue the apes.
Along the way they are variously helped or hindered by a foul-mouthed, eyebrow-pierced, tattooed intern; a catty rival journalist named Cat; a wife with a rapidly ticking biological clock; two quirky computer hackers; a megalomaniacal porn king; the foppish publisher of a tabloid magazine; a bashful forklift driver; and a Mace-wielding Sunday school teacher.
Gruen is clearly enjoying herself here. Publicity material for the book suggests that the reading experience could be expressed in a single word: "fun." And it is fun, in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink way: headlong and over-the-top.
Much of the humor amounts to sight gags and predictable punch lines. But the conceit of a household of language-endowed apes as the ne plus ultra of reality TV is terrific: an incisive piece of social commentary.
It makes one wonder why Gruen affords relatively little narrative space to her simian characters. The scenes where she takes us inside the Ape House are some of the most affecting. When the humans, in an effort to boost ratings, deliver sex toys to the house, the bonobos merely spin the vibrator like a top and cover the blow-up doll with a blanket. Later, one of them rescues a dazed bird and helps it fly away.
These scenes have a simplicity and integrity that feel at odds with the rest of the novel.
A few pages later, that same character is described as using spoken English and ASL "simultaneously." It shouldn't take a linguist to recognize that such a task is well nigh impossible. Any careful reader might guess that expressing oneself in two languages at the same time, when each employs different word order, simply wouldn't work. And it does not. (Disclosure: I've worked as an ASL interpreter.)
A minor quibble, yet it raises questions about the author's relationship to the other research-based aspects of the story. And in a book that asks us to care about complex ethical and scientific concerns, such questions matter. Gruen, the author of three other novels, including "Water for Elephants," turns her attention here to the world of six bonobos and the humans who conduct language studies with them at the fictional Great Ape Language Lab in Kansas (evidently based on the real-life Great Ape Trust in Iowa, which Gruen visited).
The first several chapters give a taste of the vast sweep of issues the novel will address: the potential for and implications of inter-species communication; the varieties and uses of sexual contact, both among humans and among the other primates; family dynamics and dysfunction; the abduction and enslavement of animals for scientific research; the crass obtuseness of pop culture; the very notion of what constitutes humanity and the humane.
Gruen heaps her topical platter high and wastes no time digging in. There is a voracious quality to her storytelling, a dogged delight in excess, and whatever a more contemplative thinker or a sharper satirist might have done with the subject matter, their methods are not hers.
"Ape House" is a busy book, crammed with locations, characters, character types, and the kind of Amazing Coincidences and Surprise Twists that would do Dickens proud.
Gruen appears never to have met a plot point she didn't like, the more outrageous the better, and a glittering plethora of these pile up to keep the novel pitching forward.
The main characters are Isabel Duncan, a scientist working with the bonobos, and John Thigpen, a down-on-his-luck journalist. Initially sent to report on work being done at the language lab, Thigpen winds up covering the increasingly bizarre series of events that unfold when the lab is bombed and the animals disappear ? only to resurface on a reality TV show called "Ape House" (subtitles allow viewers to understand what the bonobos are signing).
Duncan, badly injured in the bombing and frantic to reunite with her research subjects, whom she thinks of as "family," teams with Thigpen to find out who did it and rescue the apes.
Along the way they are variously helped or hindered by a foul-mouthed, eyebrow-pierced, tattooed intern; a catty rival journalist named Cat; a wife with a rapidly ticking biological clock; two quirky computer hackers; a megalomaniacal porn king; the foppish publisher of a tabloid magazine; a bashful forklift driver; and a Mace-wielding Sunday school teacher.
Gruen is clearly enjoying herself here. Publicity material for the book suggests that the reading experience could be expressed in a single word: "fun." And it is fun, in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink way: headlong and over-the-top.
Much of the humor amounts to sight gags and predictable punch lines. But the conceit of a household of language-endowed apes as the ne plus ultra of reality TV is terrific: an incisive piece of social commentary.
It makes one wonder why Gruen affords relatively little narrative space to her simian characters. The scenes where she takes us inside the Ape House are some of the most affecting. When the humans, in an effort to boost ratings, deliver sex toys to the house, the bonobos merely spin the vibrator like a top and cover the blow-up doll with a blanket. Later, one of them rescues a dazed bird and helps it fly away.
These scenes have a simplicity and integrity that feel at odds with the rest of the novel.
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