Hale’s novel is so stuffed with allusions high and low, so rich with philosophical interest, that a reviewer risks making it sound ponderous or unwelcoming. So let’s get this out of the way: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is an absolute pleasure. Much of the pleasure comes from the book’s voice . . . There is a Bellovian exuberance befitting a Chicago-born autodidact . . . There’s also great pleasure in the audacity of the story itself. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore announces that Benjamin Hale is himself a fully evolved as a writer, taking on big themes, intent on fitting the world into his work.
Christopher Beha, The New York Times Book Review
Swinging through the absurd tale of a talking chimpanzee, Hale wraps his prehensile wit around humanity's deepest philosophical questions. From the magic of consciousness to the reifying function of language, the value of art and the morality of science, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is a brilliant, unruly brute of a book - the kind of thing Richard Powers might write while pumped up on laughing gas. ... When the novel's antics aren't making you giggle, its pathos is making you cry, and its existential predicament is always making you think. No trip to the zoo, western Africa or even the mirror will ever be the same.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Benjamin Hale is the most talented and intriguing young writer I’ve met in years. I love his prose, his dialogue, and his balls. Not his actual balls, of course, but the balls to write so ecstatically and with such mad conviction. When I first read the wonderfully comedic The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, I was so pleased to have come across a Writer. A writer with a capital W. Someone who clearly loves books and the power of the written word. It was like, “Ok, here’s a guy who's going to be producing novels for years. This is the real deal.” It was like being a baseball scout in Oklahoma in the late 1940’s and seeing this young kid running around center-field, and you ask the guy next to you, “Who’s that?” And the guy says, “I don’t know, some kid named Mickey Mantle.” Well, that’s how I felt, in a literary way, when I read Benjamin Hale for the first time.
Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is an enormous, glorious rattlebag of a book. Benjamin Campbell Hale’s extremely loud debut has echoes of the acerbic musings of Humbert Humbert and the high-pitched shrieking of Oskar Matzerath. Hale’s narrator, Bruno Littlemore, is a loony, yelping, bouncing, pleading, longing, lost, loony, bleeding, pleading, laughing, beseeching wonder. The book is of such enormous originality and vitality; it is the book I feel I have been searching years for but have never yet found, until now.
Edward Carey, author of Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva
Benjamin Hale is a writer of rare and exciting talent. We’ll be reading his books for years. Dive in.
Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead
An enlightened chimp goes on the wildest adventure since Every Which Way but Loose in Hale’s mischievous debut. Bruno Littlemore, the narrator chimp, eventually lands in a research lab at the University of Chicago, where he falls in love with Dr. Lydia Littlemore, who, shortly after hearing Bruno speak his name, takes him first to her apartment (sex is had, much later) and later to the quietude of a Colorado ranch owned by a couple of odd animal rights advocates. It is in this environment that Bruno becomes a fully articulate and artistic being, but the idyll does not last: Lydia falls ill, and Bruno is captured, escapes, ends up in New York City, and befriends a dreamer named Leon with whom he mounts a performance of The Tempest before being forced by circumstance to return, tragically, to Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. Bruno, having mastered speech, is quite happy to play with this new toy, going on philosophical riffs and speaking at length about art, and while his monologues are less tedious than you’d imagine, it’s his quest for answers about the agonizing dilemmas of existence that is unexpectedly resonant.
Publisher's Weekly
Bruno is in prison. Bruno murdered someone. Bruno had a deep and affecting relationship with his caregiver; well, okay, they had sex. And in his powerful complexity, Bruno has been compared to Augie March, Alexander Portnoy, Humbert Humbert, and Oskar Matzerath of Tin Drum fame. One thing: Bruno is a talking chimp. This novel, won in a fierce auction, with foreign rights sold to a half dozen countries, is reportedly big, loud, brassy, contrary, energetic, and just plain awesome. As for the sex, "It's not bestiality," said Cary Goldstein, the book's editor at Twelve, "It's love." This will get a lot of attention and provoke a lot of conversations come the new year, so be prepared. What a way to make your debut. I can't wait.
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
In this account by a chimpanzee who ascends the evolutionary ladder, first-novelist Hale explores what it means to be human. Nine years into captivity after committing a murder, Bruno—24 years old, hairless, with his spine straightened by bipedal standing, and his surgically fashioned, humanoid nose—dictates his memoirs, having become proficient at speech, reading, and visual arts. His first name was given to him at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo where he was born, his second is taken by him from researcher Dr. Lydia Littlemore, who tests him and with whom he comes to share a home and a deep, and eventually sexual, love. Motivated by his love for Lydia and language, Bruno soon lives and functions as a human, becoming an assault on those who consider humans unique, and his blissful relationship with Lydia spawns hatred. Like his protagonist, Hale clearly loves language, using words with precision (likely to send readers to a dictionary) and for play, as when Lydia, when happy, “chortled up the engine” to start her car. With its exuberantly detailed sex between species and its concept that human cognizance of death leads to superstition and religion, this novel is likely to offend some readers, while others will find it holds a remarkable, riotous mirror to mankind.
Booklist
Spend some time in Hale's glittering world and you will be quickly rewarded: the book's brilliance is woven throughout its 580-odd pages. . . I don't think I've ever encountered a protagonist like Bruno Littlemore, but he has some obvious antecedents in Saleem Sinai, of Midnight's Children, and The Tin Drum’s Oskar Matzerath . . . Like both characters, Bruno narrates his own story from some kind of imprisonment or exile, and he is also a singular, largely self-made being, a genius auto-didact capable of bursts of rage, deep sensitivity and love, and profound philosophical disquisitions. It's the latter that provide some of the most startling sections of the novel . . . Hale's book offers all those things we ask of our novels: rich entertainment and comedy, emotional sincerity that isn't cloying,and the ability to satisfy the immense ambition it sets for itself - to free the reader from the "half-silvered mirror of his mind" and to show him humanity in a new, rarely comforting, light. Hale is preternaturally talented, and though the field has not yet fully assembled, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore must be considered one of the most anticipated novels of next year.
Jacob Silverman, Publishers Marketplace
In this buzzed-about debut novel from Twelve Books, the eponymous hero is a chimpanzee who has learned to speak, read, and enjoy the visual arts, among other human endeavors. There is apparently interspecies love (and sex!) in the book, and the jacket copy declares that it goes beyond satire “…by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human — to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.” A bookseller at legendary West Hollywood indie bookstore Book Soup has raved to me about the novel’s inventiveness and its beautiful, beautiful prose.
The Millions
This is a challenging, rewarding, incredibly complex debut. Hale's creation - Bruno Littlemore - is one of fiction's truly original characters, one that will resonate with the reader long after the book is finished.
Bob Thiel, The Bookstall (Winnetka, IL)
Of course a chimp can learn to speak, can have bad dreams about the ‘gnome chompy,’ can fall in love, perform Shakespeare, take himself extraordinarily seriously, get a nose job, kill a man, and see the United States. He can because Benjamin Hale has written an entire life here; a life that is not just convincing, but beautifully, painfully, perfectly affecting. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is not for the faint of heart; but then again, neither is living if you’re doing it right.
Hayley Grgurich, The Book Cellar (Chicago, IL)
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is a smart, expansive novel of the traditional type. Its premise and execution are as jarring as they are beguiling, and provide Hale with the point of departure for asking all the relevant questions: questions about language, animality, memory, love and belonging. For all its apparent unorthodoxy, Bruno Littlemore is above all a fascinating narrative, a work whose aesthetic allegiances place it squarely among the likes of Bellow and Nabokov.
Camden Avery, The Booksmith (San Francisco, CA)
Benjamin Hale's narrator, the unforgettable Bruno Littlemore is immediate and fully fleshed out. Hale's flawless novel is a compulsive read, interesting in so many ways: science, society, politics, and love. Bruno's original voice will refuse to leave your head until you've digested his story and gone on a journey with him for a rich, 50 well-paced, perfect chapters. And even when you finish the book, you'll be craving to hear about Bruno's new adventures, thoughts, and defiant existence. Benjamin's Hale's writing is polished and seasoned; his story of the great Bruno Littlemore is a seamless journey narrated by an irresistible and authentic voice. Get ready to be swallowed up by an accomplished, addictive, first person, American novel; Hale's first.
MG Maloney, Barbara’s Bookstore (Chicago, IL)
This dictated memoir from a chimpanzee who's learned to speak struck me as a more real and profound journey through what it means to be a person and to find love far more than any reality television show ever could. Bruno steals the show as a witty, charming, intelligent, contemplative, and ultimately admirable figure. Hints of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth pepper Hale's writing giving us an amazing odyssey of a chimp that can teach us all to be a little more human.
Unabridged Books, Stefan Moorehead (Chicago, IL)
If Saul Bellow wrote “Every Which Way But Loose,” it might be something like Hale’s excellent debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.
Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here and All About Lulu
In his debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, Benjamin Hale toys with the meaning of humanity. The extra-evolved chimpanzee of the title speaks, reads, and enjoys the visual arts, while also navigating the tricky boundaries of interspecies love and the nuances of self-identity.
Flavorpill
Hale’s Bruno is smart and inclined to archness and irony, and it’s a pleasure to follow his thoughts, darkling and otherwise . . . a book of considerable merit . . . and of high entertainment value, too, as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.
Kirkus Reviews
