Book Review: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Benjamin Hale's debut follows a chimp whose strange and complicated evolution reflects our own.

By Jennifer Pappas
Published: February 2nd, 2011 | 12:00am

As the protagonist of Benjamin Hale’s debut novel, Bruno Littlemore is a skilled orator, waxing poetic about everything from language, religion, and science to Shakespeare, family relationships, and the nuances of falling in love. This would all be perfectly normal except for one thing: Bruno is a chimpanzee—a soliloquizing, opinionated, talking chimpanzee. The novel follows Bruno as he dictates his memoirs to a research center intern named Gwen. From his humble beginnings as an “uncultured ape” at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, Bruno leads a fairly mundane life until a simple experiment reveals his capacity to “understand on some fundamental level what it means to be human.” Under the care of a primatologist named Lydia, Bruno learns to speak, read and act as humans do, going from scientific test subject to artist to underground actor to fugitive to finally and inevitably, a captive once more. Part love story, part social commentary, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore’s best moments come when Bruno is struggling to make sense of his adopted world. Amid the calamity and chaos of everyday life, Bruno discovers the splendor of language, music, pain, and the beautiful gradations of the human condition—his strange and complicated evolution a reminder of our own.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

Twelve Books, February 2011

592 pages