No Wasted Word: A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam

No Wasted Word is a bi-monthly column where Caitlin Reade Keenan discusses and reviews books by contemporary writers published by independent presses.

Written by Caitlin Reade Keenan

When my dog was a puppy he was especially sensitive and shy. He followed my husband and me closely and was only comforted by us. Visitors came, but it was stressful and scary for him and so those first few months, we nested and cuddled and looked at each other in new ways and realized that this love was different. I kissed him and could still find it gross when other people kissed their dogs. And I learned to clean up another being’s excrement and clean his foul smelling ears and apply medicine for infections. I marveled at his ability to learn, was pleased at his discerning desire for me, both when he was excited, and when he was scared.

So I was not judgmental, in fact, it seemed perfectly natural, when in Colin McAdam’s novel, A Beautiful Truth (Soho Press), Walt and Judy, two in-love Vermonters, unable to conceive, adopt a pet chimp. I understood it when Looee, the baby chimp’s screams, “had a visceral effect on her—she had no choice but to drop whatever she was doing because it felt like either the world was ending or his noises would make it end.”

Although I’d heard stories about chimps like Lucy and Nim, I’d remained judgmental about the kind of people that thought it was a wise decision to take a chimp into their home and make it one of their own. It took a novel of this kind, to make the people and circumstances feel familiar.

Watching Looee grow up with Walt and Judy was marvelous. While at times McAdam could have been telling a story about an in-love couple with a new human baby, those passages were strikingly juxtaposed with moments of miscommunication and error, like when Looee was being potty-trained: “Walt demonstrated how it was done but Looee either tapped on Walt’s penis or drank from Walt’s stream, and the two would emerge from the bathroom confused for different reasons about the significance of urine.”

In the novel’s other narrative, is scientist David Kennedy and the chimps at the Girdish Institute. David and other staff at Girdish study primates for anthropological and medical research in Florida.

In both narratives, there is gorgeous prose with sparse punctuation and the third person narration fluidly changes points of view.  Sometimes, even within the same paragraph. It is not always clear which character is responsible for what thought. This style is wonderful because the central theme challenges our perception of reality in relation to one another and to other apes.

In the Girdish narrative, McAdam’s descriptions, at first, felt awkward and I was uncomfortable reading them, but the more time I spent in that narrative the more accustomed to it I became. I learned the rhythms of that world and, like Looee who was an outsider navigating the human world, I realized McAdam masterfully devised a way for his reader to share in Looee’s feeling of displacement.

The scientific aspects of the novel were obviously heavily researched, but if a human ape is going to write the inter-workings of the mind of a chimpanzee ape, then some creative license must be taken. I think some descriptions were overworked and felt forced. Like, “They clap, as Podo used to clap, to initiate skrupulus. They groom, and the new one gestures towards the yek, inviting him to come closer to the plekter.”

However, I’m not convinced though that wasn’t a deliberate choice made by McAdam’s to tire the reader, to make her feel the struggle to understand and to make sense of another ape culture, just like Looee, Walt and Judy, and the people and apes at the Girdish institute were forced to do.

In the end though, I was never fully comfortable with this representation as the way chimps think. Nor was I fully convinced that Looee felt haunting guilt for past mistakes the way that the humans who loved him might.

Whether or not you think A Beautiful Truth accurately portrays the way chimps think, it is still an important, worthwhile book because it bravely shows the tenderness and care that apes can show one another, and also because it questions what humans are doing at the expense of other apes for personal gain.  It reminded me of the beauty of interspecies relationships I’ve had, and revealed the weirdness and wonder that occurs when any two apes (of any species) try to understand each other.