Silver

Hungarian-Argentine novelist Urbanyi (Nowhere Idea) checks in with a sweeping, wandering satire of Americans, the academy and base human impulses. It centers on the eponymous white gorilla, who spends his life as the subject of successive, hopelessly idiotic scientific research projects, and who develops rather unusually in the process. Purchased from an African poacher and then raised by a pair of Stanford sociologists, Silver learns to eat with a knife and fork, brush his teeth, read and talk (by watching Sesame Street). Once an adolescent, Silver is caught engaged in sexual exploration with his human ""mother"" by her jealous husband, who is infuriated by the gorilla's increasingly human characteristics. After a purgatorial stint in a zoo, Silver is made a part of the ill-conceived Operation Great Return in which apes ""corrupted"" by American society are ""reeducated"" and ""readapted"" into the wilds of Africa, an effort led by the gratingly enthusiastic Jane Gudart. By then, Silver has crossed the line into humanity, and is consumed by desires for hamburgers, whisky, cigarettes and human women. On the island preserve, fruitless lessons on ""nest-building"" and slapstick interactions between the motley assortment of Americanized primates are set against the possibility of another ape-human romance; Jane, by contrast, exhibits more and more ape-like behavior. It's funny in bursts, but reads like a stretched short story.