Talk to Me

July 1, 2021
Farce meets tragedy and science meets show business in this romantic triangle featuring a student, a professor, and a chimpanzee. There's an antic energy to Boyle's latest which comes at the expense of character development. Aimee Villard is na�ve and beautiful, a college student who recognizes how attractive she is because of her effect on men--and a certain chimpanzee. Yet she refuses to use her beauty to manipulate and thus provides this novel with its heart. She is a clich� of the innocent young coed when that term was used often and seemingly without condescension. Guy Schermerhorn is a professor who's deeply invested in researching the communicative possibilities between humankind and the simian world and who parlays that work into TV appearances. After his marriage falls apart, he falls in love, or lust, with Aimee, whom he's hired to help with his live-in chimpanzee. The chimp, named Sam, also falls in love with Aimee because of the same animal magnetism that attracts Guy. As the characters in this novel respond to animal urges and instincts, Sam emerges as the most complex. Short chapters written to capture his perspective alternate with longer ones that find his human enablers attempting to deal with whatever mischief he has made. And they alternate along different timelines, with Sam's chapters often reflecting a near future that the humans have yet to experience. Sam can talk with sign language and understand, he responds to treats and to scolding, but he also learns to lie and scheme and manipulate, aping human behavior. As Sam and Guy compete for Aimee's affection (which she shares with both), Aimee and Guy compete for Sam's favor. And all of them must contend with another professor, a supervisor to whom Guy reports, who is some sort of alpha male. Or maybe God--to the animals, at least. Despite his domestication, Sam occasionally shows signs of being a wild animal. This can't end well, and it doesn't, as a comedy of manners takes a darker turn. There might be a movie here, Planet of the Apes as a rom-com.

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July 19, 2021
Boyle’s diverting latest (after Outside Looking In) is equal parts road novel, campus drama, and roundabout love triangle focused around Sam, an intelligent chimp raised among humans who communicates through sign language, making him a brief cause célèbre in the mid-1980s. Behavioral scientist and college professor Guy Schermerhorn has a lot to prove—his life’s a ruin and his custodianship of Sam is in question—leading him to stake everything on an appearance with Sam on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, lest Guy’s sinister superior, Dr. Moncrief, cart Sam off to be experimented on, or worse. Guy enlists Aimee Villard, an eager student with an immediate connection to Sam. Professor and student embark on a halfhearted relationship, but both are focused on the increasingly demanding chimp, and, as Dr. Moncrief moves to make good on his threats, Aimee takes Sam on a cross-country road trip, winding up in a trailer court in Arizona, where the two eke out a life among the local misfit community. Chapters from Sam’s perspective make him a captivating creation, but fans of Boyle will recognize a bit of retread from his previous novels and stories. It’s a fun ride, but it doesn’t exactly break new ground. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc.

July 1, 2021
California undergrad Aimee Villard is unmotivated and aimless, procrastinating by watching To Tell the Truth when she becomes transfixed by a contestant who studies primate language acquisition and is currently cross-fostering a chimpanzee named Sam. It turns out that this professor, Guy Schermerhorn, teaches at Aimee's university and is seeking assistants to work on the project. When Aimee shows up at the house, she forms an immediate bond with Sam. Boyle eloquently lays out the philosophical and ethical debates of raising chimps in a human household. Sam communicates via sign language but also understands verbal commands. He loves pizza and is a whiz at the shell game. Sam shows regret and jealousy and suffers from separation anxiety, but he can also be cunning and manipulative and prone to temper tantrums. In short, he is not unlike most toddlers. When Sam reaches maturity, however, he will have the strength of several men. Boyle poignantly exposes our anthropocentric biases while exploring the nature of consciousness and reminds us of the adage about the most dangerous species in the zoo being the humans.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Boyle's name sparks instant interest, and fans will reach his latest novel about humanity's dangerous confusion about our place in nature.

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Starred review from September 24, 2021

Like many of Boyle's novels (The Harder They Come; the PEN/Faulkner winner World's End), this latest--told alternately from the point of view of the human and chimp characters--finds a sensitive issue and dives deep into an exploration that locks on and won't let go. Sam, a chimp raised by humans, appears on a talk show with Guy, a California State professor who has raised Sam and taught him sign language. A student named Aimee sees Sam on TV and volunteers to work with him. That Sam might be dangerous, with twice the strength of a human, adds great uncertainty to the enterprise. When Moncrief, the actual owner of Sam, suddenly takes him away to be housed in a terrifying chimp farm, Guy's academic studies are ruined, and Aimee is bereft. Aimee goes to the farm and eventually breaks Sam free from captivity, but while they are able to hide for a short time, the story ends in tragedy. VERDICT Against a backdrop of lurid news stories of chimps living with humans, where things go horribly wrong, this novel makes a visceral kind of sense and raises uncomfortable issues of human relationships with other species. Highly recommended.--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

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