Sara Gruen's novel will help secure Great Ape Trust's place in ape language history

Des Moines, Iowa – May 11, 2010 – A scientist whose breakthrough language studies with Kanzi and other bonobos expects bestselling author Sara Gruen’s soon-to-be released fourth novel, Ape House, to help secure Great Ape Trust’s place in history as the undisputed leader in scientific investigations into language and culture among great apes.

Truth and fiction are closely aligned in Gruen’s Ape House, a story centered on a fictitious family of language-competent bonobos living in a fictitious language laboratory. The similarities to the language research program at Great Ape Trust – based on the 40-year research corpus of Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and William M. Fields and seeking to understand the effects of rearing culture on bonobos' cognitive abilities – are no coincidence.

Gruen’s book addresses head-on the idea that bonobos reared in a culture where spoken language and symbolic representation are the norm acquire language the same way human children do: by being exposed to it.

The result, said ape language pioneer Savage-Rumbaugh, a Scientist With Special Standing at Great Ape Trust, is that Gruen’s novel helps establish in an easily accessible and entertaining manner a multifaceted picture of culture among great apes and other sentient beings.

“Because it (Great Ape Trust) is unique in the world, everyone wants to visit,” said Savage-Rumbaugh. “Every scientist wants a chance to see if this is true or if it isn’t true. I think as it comes to be understood, and this book is a good start, that it’s really true, a few things will happen. First of all, the world will want to protect it. Secondly, the world will want to create other similar situations, not just one, and they may want to see how far down the phylogenetic scale culture goes, and how far down the phylogenetic scale linguistic kinds of phenomena go if you start to see them embedded in life, rather than through the didactic training method of just holding up cards.”

In 2007, Gruen visited the real-life language-competent bonobos at the real-life language laboratory at Great Ape Trust so she could represent the species authentically in Ape House. Gruen, whose Water for Elephants has resided on the New York Times best-seller list for almost four years and is now being made into a motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, visited again in April to renew what she calls life-changing friendships with the bonobo Panbanisha and her family.

For Gruen, a Canadian-born author now living in North Carolina, the experience has been nothing short of magical.

“Four years ago, it would never have occurred to me that I would ever be able to say that I have great apes as personal friends, and now I can say that,” she said. “That’s just an amazing life change. I am aware of them all the time, and I want other people to be aware of them. It’s sort of an otherworld experience, and yet it’s not. They are of the same world. They’re apes and we’re apes.”

Gruen earned her first invitation to visit Great Ape Trust three years ago after completing “homework” assignments that included a trip to York University in Toronto, where linguists James D. Benson and William S. Greaves have drawn heavily on the work of Savage-Rumbaugh and Great Ape Trust resident bonobo Kanzi.

Gruen and Panbanisha, Kanzi’s half-sister and an ape language superstar in her own right, became instant friends. She dedicated the book to “great apes everywhere but especially Panbanisha.”

“I felt a strong connection with her the first time I met her, and it was unexpected because she is the quiet one,” Gruen said, explaining that while Kanzi seized the opportunity to demonstrate his English competency and seemed to appreciate his rock-star status, Panbanisha was not as eager to “show off.”

“She is just the epitome of ‘still waters running deep.’”

Knowing that she would need to supply icebreakers to open the conversation, Gruen brought photos of her dogs and her children. The pictures of the dogs elicited no response from Panbanisha, but when Gruen showed the bonobo a photo of her young children enjoying a bubble bath, Panbanisha, the mother of two, used her lexigram keyboard to respond “babies washing bubbles.”

“It was the first time I had the actual two-way conversation with an ape, and it was magical,” Gruen said.

Her novel, which tells the story of bonobos kidnapped for a reality television program, also is the story of culture.

“Ape House is about bonobos, it features bonobos, and it’s also about human culture. It transposes the two of them and it explores the ways in which bonobos relate to bonobos and humans relate to humans,” Gruen said. “One of the flip sides of that is the Schadenfreudic glee humans take in watching other humans fail in their relationships with others, and one of the symptoms of that, I think, is tabloid journalism and the gossip rags. I have a little fun exploring that.”

For many readers, Ape House will be their first introduction to bonobos, originally thought to be a subspecies of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and known as pygmy chimpanzees until 1929. Although closely related, chimpanzees and bonobos are strikingly different. Bonobo society is matriarchal, and the apes are known for their egalitarian, peaceful, cooperative and sensitive nature. Chimpanzees are male dominant and exhibit sometimes lethal aggression toward other groups. They have been known to eat the infants of other chimpanzee groups, but infanticide among bonobos is rare.

Anatomically, their differences are slight. Bonobos are more slender and have longer arms than chimpanzees. Their faces are black and they have pink lips, compared to light-faced chimpanzees. Bonobos have black hair that is parted in the middle.

Found in the wild only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, endangered bonobos are in extreme peril and exist in fragmented pockets. Estimates of their actual numbers range from 5,000 to 50,000. Hunting and habitat destruction are their greatest threats.

“Many people just haven’t heard about bonobos,” Gruen said, “so if I can do anything with this book, I hope to make people aware of them before it’s too late and we lose them.”

About Ape House:

Published by Random House under the Spiegel & Grau imprint, the 320-page hardcover book (ISBN: 978-0-385-52321-9) will be available Sept. 7. Published in multi-media format, it also will be released as an unabridged audio compact disc, an unabridged audio-book download, an eBook and as a large-print trade paperback.

Random House advance promotion:

“Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants has become one of the most beloved and bestselling novels of our time. Now Gruen has moved from a circus elephant to family of bonobo apes. When the apes are kidnapped from a language laboratory, their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4 percent of our DNA. 

A devoted animal lover, Gruen has had a life-long fascination with human-ape discourse, and a particular interest in Bonobo apes…. She has studied linguistics and a system of lexigrams in order to communicate with apes, and is one of the few visitors who has been allowed access to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where the apes have come to love her. In bringing her experience and research to bear on this novel, she opens the animal world to us as few novelists have done.

“Ape House is a riveting, funny, compassionate, and, finally, deeply moving new novel that secures Sara Gruen’s place as a master storyteller who allows us to see ourselves as we never have before.”