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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San Miguel by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Published by Viking on September 18, 2012

The most distant of the Channel Islands from the coast of California is rain-soaked, wind-swept, and populated by sheep. In San Miguel, T. Coraghessan Boyle tells the stories of three women who made the island their home. While fans of character-driven historical fiction featuring strong women should be pleased with San Miguel, readers who gravitate to plot-driven fiction will probably find this novel less satisfying than some of Boyle's earlier, more captivating work.

Part one tells Marantha's story. It is a masterful portrayal of a woman struggling to control the dark side of her personality, to adapt gracefully to miserable circumstances while coping with failing health. In the late nineteenth century, Marantha joins her second husband (Will Waters) and adopted daughter (Edith) on San Miguel where, with Marantha's money, Will has purchased a half interest in a sheep farm. Marantha hopes to recuperate from consumption but soon realizes that a rainy, windy island is the wrong setting in which to salvage her health ... or, for that matter, her marriage. To paraphrase The Clash: Will she stay or will she go?

With Marantha, Boyle is at his best, creating a carefully nuanced character and describing her life in powerful terms. Marantha knows she has become "a crabbed miserable thing who said no to everything, to every pleasure and delight no matter how small or meaningless," but that is not the person she wants to be. As only a gifted writer can do, Boyle generates sympathy and understanding for a character whose thoughts and behavior are often spiteful.

Part two shifts the focus to Edith and her frustrated desire to be independent, free from her stepfather's tyranny. Hers is a story of isolation and desperation, of a blossoming woman longing for the company of intellect and social grace ("On a ranch, there are no gentlemen or ladies -- there was just life lived at the level of dressed-up apes tumbled down from the trees"). Boyle encourages the same empathy for Edith as he does for Marantha, although Edith is less complex and, for that reason, less interesting.

Part three begins in 1930. It introduces a woman named Elise who, at 38, is newly married to Herbie Lester. Having never been west of the Hudson, Elise moves to San Miguel with Lester. Unlike her predecessors, Elise manages to make a life that, if not quite normal, is generally satisfying despite Lester's growing detachment from reality.  Unlike the first two sections, some chapters in part three drag, adding little to character development while recounting events that are of no significant interest. The story perks up with the encroachment of World War II and a series of dramatic events that foreshadow an inevitable conclusion.

Edith resurfaces in part three as a memory, a tale told by Jimmie, the island's constant resident and the only character to appear in all three sections.  While the information Jimmie provides adds welcome continuity, the story of Edith's adult life is disappointingly abbreviated. Elise, on the other hand, is a character in full, but not a particularly vibrant one.

Boyle’s surgical prose slices into his characters, exposing their inner workings.  Boyle introduces the setting and characters in short chapters that bear descriptive titles:  “The Kitchen,” “The Flock,” “The Wind,” “Jimmie,” and so on.  Occasionally they are repeated, creating the sense of characters living parallel lives:  “The House” on San Miguel in which Marantha dwells, for instance, is less inviting that “The House” that will become Elise’s home.  Jimmie also rates more than one chapter heading, but he is hardly worth the space.  The novel belongs to the female characters, not the men.

The novel is aptly named.  The island of San Miguel is virtually a character in the novel, fickle and treacherous, beautiful and harsh, challenging its inhabitants with relentless wind and sand.  The sense of isolation Boyle creates is vivid.

That the characters are based on real people is perhaps San Miguel's greatest weakness. At its best, the novel creates tension as the characters struggle to survive the perils of nature and the numbness of seclusion. In part three, however, the story falls flat. Boyle's fidelity to the real-world characters, his failure to make Elise and all of the male characters more interesting than they actually were, causes the novel to lose momentum after a strong start. For its sense of history and place, and for Marantha's compelling story, San Miguel is worth reading, but this is far from Boyle's best work. 

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