"With its lively dialogue, fast-paced plot and adroit use of historical detail, Monkey Town is a welcome contribution and important read," our reviewer writes.
[This review originally appeared in Geotimes in 2006.]
With a plethora of books about the Scopes trial already cluttering the shelves, including Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Summer for the Gods, is there really a need for Ronald Kidd’s Monkey Town? Indeed, there is.
Today as in 1925, the controversy over evolution centers on the science curriculum of the public school system, and so teenagers are bound to be curious about its history. Yet treatments aimed at such readers tend to be sober factual accounts, short on narrative verve and dramatic flair. The exception, of course, is the play Inherit the Wind, which, though not aimed specifically at the young, nevertheless quickly became a staple of the high school classroom and the high school stage. For all its dramatic virtues, however, Inherit the Wind was not intended as a documentary: John Scopes himself quipped about the introduction of a fiancée for Bertram Cates, the character based on Scopes — “They had to invent romance for the balcony set.”
Kidd, too, invents romance for the purposes of his lively and appealing novel: His narrator Frances swoons over the handsome Scopes, fantasizing about the day that they will preside over Rhea County Central High School together. But despite this fictionalization, the setting, personalities and events of the Scopes trial are presented with scrupulous accuracy, and the few exceptions are certainly justifiable. For example, Frances is based on real-life Frances Robinson, who was eight years old at the time of the trial, but Kidd made narrator Frances older, 15 years old, presumably to connect to the intended teenage audience.
Monkey Town was inspired by a conversation Kidd enjoyed with Robinson in 1994, nearly 70 years after the trial. The plan to host the American Civil Liberties Union’s test case of the Butler Act — which forbade teachers in public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals” — in Dayton, Tenn., was hatched in the drugstore belonging to F. E. Robinson, Frances’s father. Thus Kidd has a pretext to arrange for Frances to witness or even affect the events surrounding the trial.
It is, however, a bit of a stretch for Kidd to have Frances help thwart a plot to run the Baltimore Sun’s caustic reporter H. L. Mencken out of town on a rail. (There in fact was such a plot, which Robinson’s grandfather helped to thwart.) A surprising, but delightful, touch in the book is that Frances eventually befriends Mencken, who is humanized by his love of music and his devotion to the women in his life.
Not all of the supporting characters receive such development, however. The only characters who are really fully portrayed are Mencken, Scopes, and Frances herself. But the lack of character development is not a serious flaw in the book, as the young Frances would not have possessed a great deal of insight into the personalities of the glittering visitors to Dayton on the basis of a slight acquaintance, and the intended audience would not be tremendously interested in any case.
Despite a sometimes didactic tone, Kidd convincingly renders Frances’s struggle with reconciling her own conflicted feelings about science and religion, culminating in a theological position that may or may not be deliberately unresolved. During defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s famously withering examination of politician William Jennings Bryan, witness for the prosecution, Frances comes to the realization, “Evolution, like creation, could have taken place in seven days, if the days were long enough.” But then, when she broaches the subject with her father, he objects not to the interpretation of the days of Genesis but to the idea of common ancestry — “You think your Grandpa Haggard came swinging in on some tree?” — to which she lacks a ready answer.
With its lively dialogue, fast-paced plot and adroit use of historical detail, Monkey Town is a welcome contribution and important read — especially in a time where communities across the country still wrestle with the perceived religious consequences of evolution, and the quality of science education suffers as a result.
