Talk to Me by T.C. Boyle

Published by Ecco on September 14, 2021

T.C. Boyle tells stories that that are entirely original. His novels showcase the diversity and absurdity of the human experience. In Talk to Me, his focus is on the quasi-human experience of a chimpanzee who has been raised as a human.

Boyle draws on the work of Jane Goodall, the television appearances of J. Fred Muggs, and the episodic rise and fall of a branch of psychology that studies chimpanzees to gain insight into human cognition. Talk to Me is set in the 1970s. Its star is a chimpanzee named Sam who was stolen from his mother in infancy, taken to a breeder in Iowa, and loaned to a psychology professor in California named Guy Schermerhorn. The professor raises Sam in a human environment, teaches him sign language, and hopes to propel himself to fame and academic stardom by having Sam appear as a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

Several of the chapters are written from Sam’s perspective. Boyle supplies the vocabulary that Sam lacks to capture the essence of his experience, his emotions and reactions, his joys and fears. Maybe Boyle stretches the ability of a chimp to engage in complex reasoning, but maybe he doesn’t. The point is, we can’t know a chimpanzee’s thoughts, which is why using them as research animals raises serious ethical questions about primate experimentation. A priest in the novel, convinced that Sam has a soul, even baptizes Sam — another stretch, perhaps, but if souls exist, who is to say that animals can’t have them?

We quickly learn that Guy’s wife has left him and that Sam isn’t adjusting well to her absence. Early in the novel, a student named Aimee Villard — an introverted young woman who isn’t sure what she wants to make of her life — sees Sam on To Tell the Truth and knows she wants to meet him. She applies for a job at the ranch where Guy is raising Sam. As soon as she arrives, Sam — who has been on a rampage and is about to escape — becomes calm and subdued. He bonds instantly with Aimee and she returns his affection. Aimee finds in Sam what she has never found in a human relationship. Guy is thrilled to have an assistant who can control Sam. He’s also happy that Aimee is pretty and quickly seduces her. Aimee is happy to have a sex life but is even happier that she can spend all her non-coital time interacting with Sam.

Guy is a self-centered jerk, but the novel’s primary villain is Donald Moncrief, a professor in Iowa who owns Sam. Conflict arises between Guy and Moncrief. Guy has staked his academic reputation on Sam, while Moncrief is certain that evolutionary psychology and primate studies are a dead end. Besides, Sam is getting too old to continue living as a human. Yet living as a human is all Sam has ever known. If part of that lifestyle goes against his instincts (he’d rather be climbing trees than sitting in a chair and answering Guy’s questions), his relationship with Aimee makes the tedium of a human lifestyle worth enduring. Like a human, Sam is motivated to make sacrifices in exchange for love and acceptance.

The story takes off when Aimee is separated from Sam. The scenes of Sam in a cage —not understanding how to live without Aimee, not understanding that he’s not a human, not understanding his relationship to the shrieking primates in neighboring cages — are powerful and affecting. The choices Aimee makes about Sam, including a very difficult choice at the novel’s end, are easy to understand and appreciate.

Boyle makes it easy to empathize with Aimee. Like Sam, although perhaps less selfishly, love motivates Aimee to make sacrifices. She wants to do what’s right for Sam, but the sacrifices she needs to make to let him live a meaningful life are overwhelming. Sam can’t be left unattended for a minute. His sense of humor, his curiosity, and his temper all motivate him to engage in acts that range from mild mischief to wholesale destruction. By the end of the novel, Aimee’s devotion to Sam is complete. She can have no relationships with humans. She can hold no ordinary job. She can’t continue her education. She can’t live in an apartment. But she perseveres because the alternative is to condemn Sam to a life in a cage, a life in which he is controlled by cattle prods, a life without love or fun or intellectual stimulation.

Talk to Me illustrates the difficult moral questions that surround scientific inquiry into animal behavior, as well as the philosophical questions that surround animal intelligence. Is there a difference in kind rather than degree between animal intelligence and human intelligence? Do animals have souls? Do people? If freedom is a cherished value for humans, why do humans feel entitled to put animals in cages? If most decent humans now regard slavery as fundamentally wrong, will a time come when decent humans believe it is wrong to cage animals?

Boyle’s prose is low-key, yet he occasionally delivers a sentence that shines: “In the evenings, he made the rounds of the bars, exploring what lack of purpose involved at its core.” Boyle proves again in Talk to Me that he is a masterful storyteller. The novel blends tragedy and offbeat comedy in a unique plot that is absorbing from beginning to end.

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