Book Club Current Reading Selection: The Ape House by Sara Gruen
From NY Times:
The first several chapters give a taste of the vast sweep of issues the novel will address: the potential for and implications of interspecies communication; the varieties and uses of sexual contact, both among humans and among the other primates; family dynamics and dysfunction; the abduction and enslavement of animals for scientific research; the crass obtuseness of pop culture; the very notion of what constitutes humanity and the humane. Gruen heaps her topical platter high and wastes no time digging in. There is a voracious quality to her storytelling, a dogged delight in excess, and whatever a more contemplative thinker or a sharper satirist might have done with the subject matter, their methods are not hers. “Ape House” is a busy book, crammed with locations, characters, character types, and the kind of Amazing Coincidences and Surprise Twists that would do Dickens proud. Gruen, subscribing to the more-is-more theory, appears never to have met a plot point she didn’t like, the more outrageous the better, and a glittering plethora of these pile up to keep the novel pitching forward.
