The author rubs our noses in the grotesque, capping the odyssey of Bruno's formative years with the discovery that Lydia has a brain tumor and is pregnant by her chimpanzee lover. As he acquires language and self-awareness, Bruno finds a companion - a companion in every sense of the word - in his human caretaker Lydia, bites off the finger of a worker at the University of Chicago's Behavioral Biology Lab and freaks out at an exhibit of his paintings. It requires a strong stomach and considerable patience to stick with Benjamin Hale's protagonist, a chimpanzee who can speak and read, through the story's increasingly lurid first half.
Sprawling, ambitious, aiming to shock as well as to illuminate, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" is a classic example of an overreaching first novel.
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