In the enclosure and research room, the rules aren’t made by humans or bonobos. Instead they’re somewhere in between, some compromise we all constantly negotiate.
This book was a page-turner, like Schulman's last, Three Weeks in December. Here, as there, the author folds a a bunch of cool, science-y stuff into her novel. It certainly fits one of my current criteria for a novel, that it not be just a story about human animals. Anthropogenic climate change and its consequences, a bio-continuist model of human minds (i.e. human animals are more like non-human animals than most think) and a non-moralistic critique of humans' self-enhancement by technology are all worthy themes that are blended into a complex plot headed by a prickly, idiosyncratic, but engaging protagonist. I wanted to feel blown away, the way you feel reading Richard Powers at his best, or the way you feel reading, say, Karen Joy Fowler's We are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I only felt almost that way, and I don't know why. Maybe if I were startled by the novel's insights rather than already sympathetic to them I'd feel differently. So, four but not five stars.
