Audrey Schulman has...written a riveting page-turner about bonobos — yes, the chimplike primates — and set the action in a very near and dire future ... Sharply observant of primate behavior (both human and animal), Schulman’s quick-moving and dramatic prose doesn’t really lend itself to ready quotation. Burke, like many a New Yorker, believes Midwestern humor consists mainly of 'knee-slapping guffaws, as intellectual as euchre.' More poetically, she recognizes that 'each important moment in life has about it a stillness, an extra beat, an awareness of the edges.' As a result, when she finds herself falling in love 'something inside her clicked. Some animal part of her brain.' Let me add that in creating white-knuckle tension or describing sudden violence, Schulman can rival any our of our more famous thriller writers.
Schulman sets her witty tale in a near future where many characters enjoy enhanced genetics and technological implants. Those who can’t afford such augmentations 'had begun to resemble groundhogs — a certain meaty compression, a tendency to breathe through the mouth' ... Theory of Bastards is lifted by its science, flecked like mica throughout the story ... The writer skillfully weaves fact with fiction. Her chapters are short, her sentences clipped and efficient, if not beautiful ... Despite a bit of limp philosophizing near the end, she brings insight, amusement and — in contrast to the bonobos — much delayed human gratification. Her protagonists don’t even hold hands until page 390. Still, she makes it worth the wait.
The misunderstood nature of female desire is at the center of her inquiries, both in how it guides the bonobos, who are ruled by a bald, benevolent dictator called Mama, and in how Burk experiences it in her own surgery-scarred body. Ms. Schulman is a swift, confident, engaging writer who wields her considerable research—the novel includes a five-page appendix documenting her sources—with a nimble touch. And when, near the conclusion, disaster inevitably strikes, it yields the unforgettable image of Burk, Stotts and a troop of randy bonobos trekking together across an evacuated middle America, the hope for the future found in the secrets of the evolutionary past.
Contrary to what one might expect, the story’s first half, with its heady subject matter and infinite trajectorial possibilities, is what proves spine-tingling, whereas the second half’s narrowing into a tale of survival goes the way of standard genre fare ... No amount of edge-of-your-seat-style thrills in the second half can beat Frankie’s earlier experiences: taking up a daily observation post in the bonobos’ jungle-like glass enclosure after obtaining permission to enter from 'Mama'; carefully recording several females’ desire for the male 'Sweetie' when they’re ovulating; and participating in Stotts’s efforts to teach 'Goliath' how to transform stones into tools. And, fittingly, it is Frankie’s take on the 'benefit in having the lover’s baby rather than the husband’s' (in other words, the theory of bastards) that both gives the novel its title and marks the culmination of Schulman’s quixotic yet surprisingly successful attempt to fashion the scientific study of human and bonobo sexual preferences into enthralling fiction.
Described by its publisher as a literary novel that is not quite dystopian, Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards offers readers an interesting premise with potential that is never fully realized ... While Theory of Bastards is marketed as science fiction, the way Schulman approaches the narrative does not come across as innovative or genre-bending. The story would have benefited from directly addressing the parallels between the bonobos and their human minders, but the novel doesn’t do this, choosing instead to skate over the narrative potential here. By not going deeper into the implications of the fictional environment she has created, the author evinces an unwillingness to engage in the kind of robust world-building required in a truly satisfying dystopian novel.
The main section of the book, chronicling Frankie’s initial spell at the Foundation, is devoted to relationship-building and fact-finding. Occasionally those facts, evolutionary and psychological, are intrusive. Fortunately, Ms Schulman’s imagined future is intriguing, an all-too-credible realm of self-driving cars, talking fridges, printable food and data-accessing BodyWare, plagued by extreme weather and cyber-attacks. Her cast, human and simian, is compelling, particularly her heroine, who rebounds from one cruel blow after another ... Ms Schulman’s finest novel yet is an examination of sexual relations, the 'careful theatre' of civilisation, and humanity’s responsibilities in a rapidly changing world. It is both an edifying read and an exhilarating one.
...seemingly disparate elements make for a deeply unusual, psychologically astute novel about technology and survival, sex and love. If the late Philip K. Dick and Ann Patchett had managed to team up and write a collaborative novel, it might look something like this. Beguiling, irreverent, and full of heart.
Schulman’s vision of the future is powerful and strange, but it is less a commentary on society’s dependence on technology than a propulsive story rooted in a future that feels possible. The incorporation of research into the narrative is seamless, and the result is an astute, impeccable page-turner readers will savor.
