BOOK REVIEW: There Are Signs of Civilized Life on Earth: the Bonobo Apes in Sara Gruen's 'Ape House'
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Life is good for linguistic scientist Isabel Duncan as Sara Gruen's "Ape House" (Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, 320 pages. $26.00) opens. Duncan works with an extended family of six bonobo apes at the Great Ape Language Lab in Lawrence, Kansas -- six creatures who are family to her more than most of her human colleagues. She's in her late twenties and is secretly engaged to Peter Benton, the two decades older head of the lab and has just had a visit by John Thigpen, a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who displays admirable knowledge of bonobos and quickly bonds with Bonzi, Sam, Mbongo, Makena, Lola and Jelani -- her bonobo family. Thigpen writes a sensitive human-interest feature story about these smaller relatives of chimpanzees -- and us -- and how they communicate with humans using American Sign Language.
A day after Thigpen's visit, Isabel's whole world changes when invaders storm the lab where she is alone with the six bonobos, blasting the doors open, injuring Isabel and allowing the terrified but physically uninjured bonobos to run outside and head for the trees. While Isabel is hospitalized, the six bonobos are mysteriously sold, bringing relief to the president of the university where the lab is based: the terrorists allegedly responsible for the attack on the lab also vandalized his house by flooding it with a garden hose poked through a broken window. A group calling itself Earth Liberation League claims responsibility for the attack.
Thigpen is assigned to cover the story, when his editor Elizabeth acknowledges that he's the logical person since he knows the people -- and the apes -- involved. Covering her bets, Elizabeth also sends Cat Douglas, a highly competitive reporter who accompanied him on his earlier trip but was not allowed into the bonobo enclosure because of a cold she tried in vain to hide. Isabel tells her that bonobos share more than 98 percent of the DNA with humans and are very susceptible to human illnesses.
A subplot in "Ape House" involves John and his novelist wife Amanda. She's discouraged by the rejection letters for her latest manuscript, after publishing a moderately successful first novel. When she gets an offer to work in Los Angeles on a television series based on her novel, previously papered over conflicts in their marriage emerge: Amanda, in her mid thirties, wants to have a child, but John isn't so sure. He's hanging on to his job at the "Inky", as the paper is universally called, in an era of layoffs and massive downsizing in the newspaper industry. They decide to try out the L.A. experiment in TV writing and Amanda accompanies John on his flight to Kansas, leaving the next day for Los Angeles.
John Thigpen's suspicions about his job and his rivalry with fellow reporter Cat Douglas turn out to be justified and he's recalled to Philadelphia to fill in for another staffer on the "Urban Warrior" beat, covering potholes, people who allow their dogs to poop in the parks and similar urban frustrations. He finally decides he's had enough and abruptly quits his job and flies out to join Amanda. Without his knowledge, Amanda sends out his resume to every print publication in town and John is hired by the "Times" to cover the story of the "Ape House" reality show taped in Lizard, New Mexico, not far from El Paso, Texas. The rub is that the "Times" is not the Los Angeles Times, but rather a supermarket tabloid called the Weekly Times.
The "Ape House" (think "Big Brother's House" and similar shows) TV show featuring the missing apes debuts with John's previous employer at the New York Observer in charge and it immediately becomes the biggest—and unlikeliest—phenomenon in the history of modern media. Millions of fans are glued to their screens watching the apes order greasy take-out, have generous amounts of sex, and sign for Isabel to come get them. Now, to save her family of apes from this parody of human life, Isabel must connect with her own kind, including John, a green-haired vegan, and a retired porn star with her own agenda.
The scene in Lizard, as Gruen portrays it, reminded me of a Billy Wilder movie from 1951 starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling called "The Big Carnival" (also known as "Ace in the Hole") where Douglas plays a newsman working for an Albuquerque newspaper who prolongs the rescue of a man -- Sterling's husband -- trapped in a New Mexico cave. He does this to pump up the story so he can get back to big-city reporting. Thigpen tries to cover the carnival-like atmosphere around the Ape House, but his editor rewrites his story to make it accessible to readers of supermarket tabloidese. Thigpen finally gets a break from hacker friends of Celia, a young intern at the language lab who narrowly missed being injured in the explosion and who is briefly suspected of being involved in it because of her association with local members of the counterculture.
Gruen manages to cover a wide range of contemporary phenomena in "Ape House" , including ageism in Hollywood, celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, famous for being famous, and the difficulty of staying employed at major American newspapers in the age of the Internet. Still, I longed for more on the interaction between Isabel and John and the bonobos, who seemed to me to be the only really intelligent species in the book.
Maybe Sara Gruen attempted to cover too much in her first novel since her wildly successful "Water for Elephants" appeared in 2006, but I enjoyed "Ape House" immensely. Having worked on five daily newspapers -- including the Los Angeles Times -- in my many years in journalism, I could identify with the frustrations of John Thigpen. "Ape House" combines literary elements employed successfully by two widely dissimilar novelists, both of whom died in the past few years, Donald E. Westlake and Michael Crichton.
About the author:
Sara Gruen lives in North Carolina with her family, which includes a husband, three children, four cats, two dogs, a goat and two horses. She has written three novels in addition to "Ape House": "Riding Lessons," "Flying Changes," and the international best-seller "Water for Elephants." The 2006 novel, now available in 44 languages, with more than 3 million copies in print, is being filmed by Fox 2000 Pictures and Flashpoint Entertainment, under the direction of Francis Lawrence, starring Robert Pattinson as Jacob Jankowski, Reese Witherspoon as Marlena and Christoph Waltz ("Inglourious Basterds") as August. The film is set for release on April 15, 2011. The fictional lab in "Ape House" is based on a real institution in Des Moines, Iowa.
Sara Gruen's website: www.saragruen.com
Publisher's website: www.spiegelandgrau.com