'Curses! To hell with efficiency! To hell with convenience! To hell with communication! What kind of future are we making for ourselves, Bruno?. Now do you understand?'Īnd how cellphones are the end of Literature. Cut his head off!' Whereas here, even if both houses of Congress voted unanimously to have my head cut off, the Supreme Court could intervene. I supposed that British royals were as nasty as my grade school teachers, and so the Queen might see me walking to school one day and say, 'I don't like the looks of that boy. When I was a child, my teachers made it abundantly clear to me that this was why I was lucky to have been born in America. That's why we have three branches of government: the executive, the legislative and the judgmental. You see, there are such things in our government as checks and balances. 'I'm no civics teacher, but I shall do my best: the Supreme Court is a panel of political whores. All of these TV shows were like a single, soothing lullaby voice, holding up a hilariously warped mirror to the middle class and whispering to them: Do not worry. These people live in a candied reality, where all the conflicts of real life appear and disappear in joyful simulcra free of the possibility of permanent consequence. They are supernaturally free of true worry, because these characters know that at the end of the episode everything will reset itself, and the world will be as new. They are free to love, to hate, to go to work, and do all the things that people do, except worry. They might have sexual relationships with one another, they might fall in and out of love with each other, they might have conflicts with each other, power struggles, or squabbles over resources. The characters in these TV shows, despite the derisive cackles of the maddening crowd that hangs in the luminiferous ether between them, do not have to worry. Bruno Littlemore just got better and better, carrying the reader to a symphonic conclusion.īut along the way, Hale takes on sitcoms, But, let's be honest: he didn't always know how to end them. Saramago rode great ideas to a Nobel (although he must have run out about the time he wrote The Double, stealing it from Dostoevsky and just removing the quotation marks and punctuation). (And yes, I'm talking about you, Kevin Brockmeier). So often, though, the author can't sustain it. I've read many books based on great ideas.

Now, restart with a great idea: a chimpanzee who learns to speak, who evolves in starts and fits into Man. No, to start: That is the greatest cover for a book, ever. Hale, a literary Incubus, seduces with timelessly crafted sentences on every page. What a debut! He knows his Shakespeare and has captured his rhythm. Benjamin Hale is scary smart and as good a writer as it is legal to be.

The evolution of bruno littlemore