Trials Of The Monkey

What do you think the screenwriting great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin thinks of his great-great-grandfather?

No? You don't know, you say? Well I do.

I do because I'm near the end of reading a well-crafted book of his, and by his, I mean Matthew Chapman's. As I said, he's a screenwriter (Consenting Adults, Runaway Jury, Color of Night—mediocre, sometimes atrocious movies, don't you think) who lives in New York and traveled to Dayton, Tenn., site of the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 to write what Publishers Weekly says is a “sardonic cultural update of Southern Fundamentalist Christianity.”

He did that, all right, and then some. The subtitle of the book, Trials of the Monkey, is An Accidental Memoir. In mostly fluid and very funny prose, Chapman recounts the failed lives of his parents and also tots up—in a most unflinching, self-flagellating way—the many flaws of his own character in the context of being a scion a few times removed of the great Darwin himself, as if to offer up for our amusement the ironic and gradual decline of those genes. Survival Of The Fittest, this is most certainly not.

He does this all while simultaneously, in alternating chapters, heaping scorn on the backwater southern American Christians and Republicans he meets (aiming the most potent of his reproaching bile at the latter, for some reason) and recapping a history of The Trial. I have to say that as much contempt as he shows for those two groups and as much poking and jeering at their ideology and attendant problems (problems, at least to him), Chapman does the same and more on his own fly-by-night youth and subsequent adult life which was spent squandering his genetic inheritance, as it were—at the same time as he was writing the book, for example, he was also fighting drunk driving charges.

He was a terrible student and self-admittedly nigh-insane. He led a profligate existence, and essentially and literally fucked his way out of an education (read the book to find out). He does not hesitate to call himself a spoiled child and one gets the sense this is a mea culpa of sorts. It is a very honest book, but it is not tight and has the feel of part stream-of-consciousness, part pillory against his resident country and its zany, simpleton tomfoolery.

This is his first book and it shows. It wanders at odd times; his little put downs aimed at those I believe are better human beings than him annoyed occasionally and thus jilted the narrative so much that I felt at those precise moments that I could read no further. Then, like an amphibian struggling out of the water, sprouting those Darwin-inspired evolutionary gills for a second life on land, he'd pull it out with some insightful commentary on Life and persuade me to continue. I guess this means I'm enjoying the book, I'm not sure.

There are a great many things to like about this book though, a list at the top of which is the honest humor Chapman writes with. So if you like humor punctuated with intellectually bankrupt (he's a self-admitted dummy), socialist Brit sneering at the piteous Republicans and Christians, this is a good book to read. First come armed with a sense of humor. Of course, if you're one-a-dem Atheists, then his ramblings will be right up your godless alley. Have fun.