Lydia asks him to set the table for three: Take, for example, the scene in which Bruno-still pre-verbal and living with Lydia, the woman who saves him from the zoo and brings him into her life-is confronted with the familiar childhood dilemma of having to share her with someone else. The challenge is to make it all somehow new-and it’s a challenge to which Hale rises beautifully. Writes Bruno: “I admit that mine is a somewhat unusual memoir…most memoirists do not feel weighed down by the onus of having to describe the process of learning to speak.”īut what impresses isn’t only the way in which Hale manages the novel’s form it’s also his deft handling and reassessment of content that could very easily have fallen prey to the kinds of clichés and trite epigrammatic statements that are the pitfalls of this kind of story. The conceit of the novel-a narrator unlike any narrator before him-turns out to be the perfect excuse for the shape of the story, a sort of narrative explanation for a form that practically demands a languid teasing out of the narrator’s life, from his earliest days to his end. Yet it is Hale’s approach to a well-worn form that sets The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore apart from the rabble. Later, in New York, during the novel’s bleakest act, Bruno hurls himself without reservation into a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and through his transformation into Caliban we get some of the novel’s most beautifully self-reflective passages. Bruno’s art continually propels the novel forward during the first and only exhibit of his work, he throws a tantrum and is subsequently forced to leave Chicago and face the world, as any archetypal hero must.
In Chicago, Bruno learns to paint before he can talk, and in converting his first private bedroom into an artist’s studio, he seems to take his first real steps toward adulthood and, by extension, toward self-actualized humanity. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is a Bildungsroman, but it is also, more specifically, the story of an artist.
In the blink of an eye, Hale takes us from Chicago to Colorado to New York City. To summarize the book here would be a Herculean task, for the strength of this novel is its many splendored plot. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is, ostensibly, Bruno’s memoir, dictated from where he sits in captivity for the murder of a man.
Here’s the premise: Bruno Littlemore, a chimpanzee born in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, is the first non-human being to gain language. The underlying question is simple: can rather traditional novels continue to do new and exciting things? Benjamin Hale’s debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, is just such a work and, in short, the answer is yes. Following the publication last August of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, there has been much debate concerning the merits of big, Dickensian works.
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