A Frankenstein's monster for the Facebook generation: a discussion of "Lucy" by Laurence Gonzales

Hello again fellow clandestine literary agents. For today's literary briefing, I thought we would discuss and pontificate over a recent literary mission concerning the novel "Lucy" by Laurence Gonzales, believe it or not, I discovered this book entirely by accident. When hunting for an audio book, that might be good for an extended car ride. I had researched a particular narrator to see what other audio books. They might have narrated (I often do this. When searching for new book possibilities, if I'm not sure what exactly I want to read, for instance. I researched "Scott brick" And discovered the Oregon files (Now one of my favorite book series).

I was intrigued by "Lucy" having read only the back cover description, which described a primatologist, similar to Jane Goodall, named Jenny Lowe studying chimpanzees and plant life in the Congo, otherwise known as "DRC" the Democratic Republic Congo. Deep an African jungle, caught in the middle of a civil war. And while running away from a guerrilla ambush. She discovers "Lucy" who turns out to be far more than your average teenage girl. And it's through her, the reader is taken on a journey halfway around the world and back again. And along the way is able to pontificate on what it truly means to be human, and whether or not, that definition is contingent on genetics, personality or the environment. Personally, when it comes to "Lucy" I feel that Laurence Gonzales's book is highly underrated. And while there are definitely some minor inconsistencies with the plot and character development to be sure. His book should still be given solid consideration by anyone who is a fan of classic human condition stories such as Frankenstein. As this book will definitely put a new spin on the human condition and give all serious literary agents planning of food for thought concerning their place in the universe....

Think of a contemporary version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in which an egotistical scientist’s creation is not a hideous-looking monster but a well-mannered teenage girl who quotes Shakespeare, listens to Tom Petty and uses Facebook and YouTube. This is the high-concept premise of Laurence Gonzales’s lumpy new novel, “Lucy.”

Lucy is part human, part ape, the result of an experiment in which a British scientist named Stone managed to artificially inseminate a genetically altered female bonobo named Leda. Lucy is reared and home-schooled by Stone in the heart of the African jungle. His plan is to send her off to college in England, where she will presumably meet a mate. He envisions her as “the universal Eve” for a new and improved race of people that will preserve the best qualities of bonobo genetics.

After Stone is killed by insurgents, Lucy is rescued by another primatologist, Jenny Lowe, who knows nothing of Lucy’s peculiar parentage. Jenny brings Lucy home with her to Chicago and, when she fails to find any of Lucy’s relatives, decides to adopt the 14-year-old girl.

Although some of Lucy’s habits strike Jenny as odd — eating bananas without peeling them, clambering up trees, looking for termites in the floor — she initially shrugs them off as the behavior of a girl who grew up in the jungle. When she starts reading through Stone’s notebooks, however, she suddenly realizes the shocking truth: Lucy is “a humanzee.”

Mr. Gonzales, who is best known for such nonfiction books as “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why,” has done a lot of research into bonobo culture and the nonverbal communication of animals, but he doesn’t manage to lend Lucy’s back story even the veneer of plausibility. In comparison, Michael Crichton’s account in “Jurassic Park” (another Frankenstein-ian novel about the wages of scientific hubris) of how dinosaurs were recreated through the use of recovered DNA reads like a report from a respected scientific journal. Not only does Mr. Gonzales fail to explain how Stone might have managed the unprecedented feat of cross-species breeding in the middle of the jungle without any real laboratory or medical facilities, but he also sidesteps the question of why Lucy’s looks are so utterly human and why her bonobo genes are evident mainly in traits like her unusual physical strength and highly acute hearing.

What Mr. Gonzales does manage to do is make Lucy an appealing character — a bright, perceptive, lonely, observant adolescent, who, like many immigrants to the United States, is perplexed by the plethora of processed foods wrapped in shiny plastic, by the ubiquity of music, by the stressed-out, alienated city crowds. He makes the rapid arc of her transformation from a shy, unsure outsider into an all-American teenager thoroughly believable, as she becomes best friends with a schoolmate named Amanda, who teaches her everything from teen-speak to how to use a computer. And he also makes Jenny’s hopes and fears for Lucy palpable to the reader — fears that become all too real when Lucy comes down with a form of a treatable virus that has never before been contracted by a human, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insist on doing some genetic tests on her blood.

Though Team Lucy decides it should seize control of this situation and announce her real identity to the world before word leaks out from doctors or the government, matters soon start to spiral out of control: a predictable media feeding frenzy ensues, along with some vicious attacks from religious extremists who denounce Lucy as a “demon child” and the spawn of Satan.

Unfortunately, Mr. Gonzales’s orchestration of these developments is increasingly hurried and perfunctory as the book hurtles along. He rushes through the momentous decision to create a YouTube video explaining Lucy’s story in her own words, making the whole scenario sound thoroughly hokey, and does much the same thing with the scenes depicting Lucy’s flight from home and efforts to elude a mysterious stalker who may or may not work for the government. The reader often has the sense that Mr. Gonzales is impatiently ticking off plot points on an outline, as if he were writing a movie treatment, not a novel.

To make matters worse, his depictions of Lucy’s enemies — fundamentalist bigots who want to send her to a zoo; conservative politicians who want to pass a bill that would officially render her “a nonhuman animal” — grow increasingly cartoonish, to the point where any real sense of threat is removed. It seems preposterous that the United States government or its agents would throw this teenage girl into a cage on an Air Force base. And it seems equally preposterous that they would allow a Mengele-like veterinarian to perform sadistic experiments on her. No more preposterous, one might argue, than the premise that a half-ape/half-human girl could exist in the first place, but having concocted that premise, it would seem that the job of the novelist is to try to get the reader to suspend disbelief for the story’s duration.

The clever ending Mr. Gonzales has come up with for “Lucy” marks a complete departure from the “Frankenstein” template and it’s oddly satisfying on an emotional level. Even so, it’s not enough to make up for all the careless writing and absurd plot shenanigans that have gone before.

LUCY

·  Hardcover: 320 pages

·  Publisher: Knopf; First Edition (July 13, 2010)

·  Language: English

·  ISBN-10: 0307272605

·  ISBN-13: 978-0307272607

·  Price: $24.95 hardcover, $11.99 Kindle edition (electronic book), $9.89 paperback

https://www.amazon.com/Lucy-Laurence-Gonzales/dp/0307272605/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

As always, agents thank you for your cooperation and keep adding to the universal literary conversation as literature is "recreation for intelligence."