Customer Reviews

Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir

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This book by screenwriter/director Matthew Chapman (who also happens to be the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin) is many things. On one hand, it's a wonderfully told piece of history, examining the Scopes Monkey Trial (many think the whole story was told in the play-and-film INHERIT THE WIND, but - as Chapman shows us - there was a lot more to it than most people know). It's also an enlightening and often laugh out-loud funny travelogue as Chapman journeys to Dayton, Tennessee (site of the Scopes Trial) to check out the Evolution vs. Creation debate firsthand. And, finally, it's a hilarious, heartbreaking, and unfailingly honest autobiography: A man's reflection on his most extraordinary life. Whether writing about the amusing characters he met in Tennessee, giving an account of the ups and downs of his career as an A-list writer in Hollywood, or (most movingly) discussing his family and the death of his mother, Chapman is never less than entertaining, perceptive and unflinching. The author is seemingly unable to completely hate anyone, yet he's also laser-beam precise in exposing their foibles (his own most of all). And for those who don't consider themselves religious but still struggle with existential and spiritual matters, TRIALS OF THE MONKEY could also be a helpful and weirdly inspirational book. I read this in two sittings, and found myself for days after regaling friends with anecdotes and lines from it. I have a feeling that TRIALS OF THE MONKEY may well be a classic-to-be, and one can only hope that Chapman's Hollywood career doesn't keep him from writing more books.

Prepare to e-mail all your cleverest friends and recommend Trials of the Monkey, Matthew Chapman's wickedly funny, politically incorrect diatribe on religious superstition and other human follies.

The narrative is loosely organized around the yearly re-enactment of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In 1925, biology teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in the public classroom in defiance of Tennessee laws. Chapman has a piquant relationship to his subject: he is the great, great grandson of Charles Darwin, who pioneered evolutionary theory.

Chapman's ostensible mission in this book is to travel to Dayton and report on the re-enactment of the Scopes trial. But this purpose is virtually lost in his wickedly delightful portraits of the people he meets on his journey. Chapman, an Englishman living in New York who writes for the film industry, harbors some predictable stereotypes about the rural southeastern United States. Yet he profiles his victims in such intriguing detail and with such wit that reading his book is a lot like eating chocolate mousse: You know you shouldn't, but it's just so delicious.

The author doesn't spare himself the edge of his own razor-sharp insight. Alternating chapters are devoted to exposing the most sordid moments of his childhood. But what does Chapman's reckless adolescence have to do with the re-enactment of the Scopes trial? This is where you have to read with some subtlety, but the key lies, perhaps, in the following sentence: "When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man, he was thinking of his progeny."

Evolution doesn't always go forward, in other words. Just look at me, the author quips. Similarly, Dayton, Tennessee, which in 1925 gloried in debating evolution with full intellectual vigor, has subsequently subsided into religious complacency and complete denial of scientific discovery, Chapman indicates.

Witty, incisive and shockingly irreverent, Chapman's talents have been largely buried in a pile of unproduced Hollywood scripts. Though he has made millions on his writing, he is virtually unknown to the reading world. With luck, Trials of the Monkey will be the first step in reversing that misfortune.

Full of doubts, fears and inexplicable successes as a not executed screen writer (Stanley Kubrick once said: if every studio in Hollywood turns down a script, it doesn't mean it is a work of genius, yet it is a very sure start.), Matthew Chapman, Darwin's great great grandson, decides to write a book.
Using the reenactment of the famous Scopes trial of 1925, where his great great grandfather's teaching are opposed by the law in Dayton Tennessee, ostensibly to find out what, if anything has changed in seventy five years, Chapman sets out to write one book, but luckily for the reader, comes up with a surprisingly fresh and different genre of memoir, accidental as the subtitle reads, yes, but warm, vibrant with and interspersed with questions that lead to more and deeper questions..
He meets a lot of real people down south, all are first introduced as iconic satirical prototypes, but Chapman's intimate curiosity strips the veneer and exposes likable human beings, troubled by qualms yet protected by the bliss of faith; some through ignorance, some through learned resignation.
Than, into this murky lake of fear and backbone America, Chapman starts launching pebbles, and his own life story comes fuzzily into focus: a brilliant enthusiastic and loving father, shaded by his hectic life and by a gap of misunderstanding with his wife, Matthew's mother who is a dazzling, witty woman, but one who fails through a repeated line of episodes to come to grips with growing up, until she drowns herself in a sea of alcohol and unquenched anxieties. Chapman's attempt at redemption through God, through bumming, through love, sex, writing, are all confidentially brought under the microscope, dissected analytically, reduced to a little more than yester-dust and than put back together.
Chapman questions his life, his fears, his angst, his inability for happiness, his touch and go existence from Millionaire to pauper and back in one fast go, and his constant fear of being found out.
Chapman uses the real characters he encounters, together with the historical protagonists of the 'Monkey Trial' of seventy five years ago, as pieces of a mirror, that twist back his reflection, and helps explore another dark place in his persona.
A powerful and sincere piece of writing, as good as any I've read lately, and better than most.
You care about all the characters, the bit players as well as the semi-hero, as they are al alive, human and vulnerable.
A refreshing and pleasantly surprising rendezvous.

I had this book for several years, given to me as a birthday present by my wife along with Will Self's Great Apes (which I've also reviewed on Amazon.com), before finally getting around to reading it. I should have picked it up earlier. What starts out as a story of Matthew Chapman, great great grandson of Charles Darwin, traveling to Dayton, Tennessee to observe the annual re-enactment of the Scopes Trial becomes something more, the "accidental memoir" of the title. Chapman recounts some highlights and lowlights from his life, including "f-ing" himself out of an education and falling into a career as a Hollywood director and screenwriter, his relationship with his alcoholic mother. In the present, he interacts with a variety of interesting people in Dayton, Tennessee, who bend and in some instances break his stereotypes of backwoods fundamentalist Christians. An example of the latter is his "favorite creationist," Bryan College creationist Kurt Wise, to whom Chapman devotes an entire chapter and part of another.

Several chapters give a vivid account of the Scopes Trial itself, and Chapman gives references at the end for more comprehensive details. While the book does center around Dayton and the Scopes trial, the re-enactment doesn't become the planned centerpiece of the book when Chapman arrives too late to see it. He ends up speaking with the director of the play, and meeting some young Christians who are further examples of stereotype breaking, as he finds them to be quite cosmopolitan.

In the end, Chapman doesn't end up too far from where he started from, but he indicates that he's willing to give up the term "atheist" for himself in favor of "agnostic," and that his experiences in Dayton gave him a better appreciation for the multiple spiritual views endorsed by his Brazilian wife, Denise Texeiria.

I found the book a quite enjoyable read, especially with my familiarity of creationism and the Scopes Trial. I recommend it.

This very unusually organized memoir of Matthew Chapman, great-great-grandson of Charles Robert Darwin, can be tough going at times, but is well worth the effort. The book began as an exploration of Dayton, Tennessee and the Scopes Trial, but ended up as a deep examination of a human being. Mr. Chapman pulls no punches when it comes to his own life and by the end of the book seems to be a man of greater understanding. If you have expectations of what this book SHOULD be, don't read it. As a person who thinks that a person can be spiritual without being religious or a believer in the supernatural, I enjoyed Mr. Chapman's musings on life, religion, evolution, and masturbation. This book is hard to pigeonhole and I know that some reviewers missed the point[s] while trying. Tell your friends about "Trials of the Monkey"!

One of the best books I have read all year, Chapman has written a compulsively readable, funny biography and travelogue that deals with fundamentalism, atheism, alcoholism, being a randy adolescent, Hollywood, etc. It is beautifully written. The only weakness is a less than satisfying ending. Chapman's life of self-indulgence is never quite made sense of. Despite his protests of needing meaning after the death of his mother, I suspect that he was ready to hit the bottle and the next gorgeous woman as soon as the last lines were pecked out on his lap top. I wasn't convinced that he arrived at a new sensitivity and need for values at the end of the book. But the old Matthew Chapman would have been just fine with me as the guy can be so entertaining in his decadence. Hats off to a very fine book!

Matthew Chapman's plan for _Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir_ (Picador), his first book, was to go to Tennessee, to the little town of Dayton, where the famous "Monkey Trial" was held in 1925. He would see the annual reenactment of the trial, and tell about his encounters with the locals. It would make a funny account of a Darwin descendant, an urbane Englishman, and an atheist, brushing up against rubes and hillbillies ("I want to find out if they still believe the world was made in six days, and is only 6,000 years old. It seems incredible that they might, but word has it that they do."). He left his high-pressure screenwriting environment in New York, and traveled by bus to Dayton to make an initial visit to the town, scoping it out before he returned to see the play itself. "That the town would re-enact this humiliation each year - presumably to pull down some cash - strikes me as hilarious, and I can't wait to see it." The urbane Englishman, experienced world traveler, and would-be reporter shows up for the play, only to find that he has inexcusably come a week late. He still has a book to write; he makes plain that although he makes terrific money as a screenwriter, he also spends terrific money, and there is potential for financial disaster if he cannot get his book out. Like plenty of resourceful writers before him, Chapman has used the accident of his disastrous timing to bring forth a fine volume of memoirs and attempts to wrestle with philosophical issues, which are nicely intercalated with the other two parts, a history of the Scopes trial and the account of the author's visit to Dayton. His book is a triumph snatched from disaster; the account of his upbringing, sexual awakening, and love for his difficult, acerbic, drunken mother is rich in sadness and laughter, and his use of the Scopes framework turns out to be fitting.

He is often the bemused anthropologist among the puzzling natives. "As a neurotic city-dweller from the North, I feared the overt violence of the redneck with a banjo in one hand and a pistol in the other." He drives "along a highway littered with yet more warnings of Christ's imminent return (it really is astonishing how obsessed they are by this)." But he learns a lesson: "Compounding the problem of maintaining a snide, superior tone, everyone's been so damned _nice_ to me. For seventy-five years people have been coming down here to mock, from Mencken to me, and all day long I've been running around asking questions and everyone's been 'just as nice as all get out,' which means as open and friendly as you could wish." His encounters with fundamentalists, including "creation scientists," are telling. Because of them, Chapman's atheism is cut back just a notch to agnosticism, the same agnosticism that was all the evidence would allow to his forebear Darwin. He cannot hold "any conviction in a matter so clearly unprovable either way," though he has new sympathy and understanding of those with faith. The change in view within a smart and funny narrator makes this book a readable, amusing, and pointed travelogue to strange territories, religious, geographic, and personal.

As an avid reader and freelance writer, I am sometimes nit-picky about unusual books, but this book is even better for its quirks. Author Matthew Chapman is a searcher who just happens to be the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. While doing research for a book on the Scopes Monkey Trials, he makes some fascinating contacts with real people from the south and his observations ring uncannily- and surprisingly- true to this life-long southerner. His personal confessions are sometimes painfully frank, but clearly genuine. Don't miss this fine, fine book.

In this unusual "accidental memoir," screenwriter Matthew Chapman capitalizes on his genetic endowment as a great-great grandson of Charles Darwin by "revisiting" the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The result is a loosely-woven and sometimes frustratingly fragmented book, but one that definitely is worth reading.

As suggested by the title, the book purports to be above all else a reflective review of the Scopes trial and the attendant social, scientific, and religious issues surrounding it. Here the results are uneven. He provides historical background on the principals involved and then fills a lot of pages with a recap of the trial gleaned directly from the court transcript. This makes for some interesting reading, but people already familiar with this historical episode will find little here that is novel.

He fleshes out his coverage of the Scopes trial by exploring the continuing Bible-thumping fundamentalism of contemporary rural Tennessee. Since he is an intelligent fellow with a sharp wit and an impressive endowment of "street smarts," Chapman presents some keen insights regarding the nature of, appeal of, and (mostly) shortcomings of Christian fundamentalism. His observations regarding the ironies of rampant social pathology amidst pretentions of born-again evangelism in the contemporary rural south are spot-on and effectively presented.

Overall, however, he clearly is no scholar and his obvious native intelligence is sometimes betrayed by lapses into intellectual laziness. In providing background for the trial, for example, he reviews the career of the star witness for the prosecution, "The Great Commoner," William Jennings Bryan. He points out that Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic National Convention of 1896 was a masterful piece of oratory, but then declares, "I don't understand the economic principles behind the speech and probably it was hogwash." Ouch. The issue of the remonetization of silver as a means of increasing the money supply, loosening credit, counteracting the devastation deflation of the previous two decades, and raising agricultural prices is not particularly relevant today, but understanding its importance to farmers and other "common folk" over a century ago requires little more than a quick perusal of an American history book.

What renders this book particularly unusual (in both a good and a negative sense) is that it turns out to be far more than a re-examination of the Scopes trial from a personal perspective. Chapman actually alternates narration of his Tennessee experiences with deeper autobiographical reflection in which he reveals his troubled childhood and the tribulations of his depressive, alcoholic mother. His writing here is sensitive and definitely confessional; in the end, however, this aspect of his "memoir" is not adequately integrated with his material related to the Scopes trial. Despite the obvious double meaning of the title with regard to just what "monkey" might be on trial in this book, it almost appears that he has written two separate narratives that have been shuffled together like a deck of cards.

Along the way, Chapman reveals himself to have been one mean, sociopathic kid, and I hope that this literary confessional has had the desired cleansing effect for his troubled soul. However, I kept wishing that in discussing his early nastiness he might succeed better in recapturing his youthful mindset, thus providing some real insights into the "lived' nature of adolescent pathology. He confesses, often in excruciating detail, but provides few real insights in this regard.

Given that this is Chapman's first book, it's not surprising that what emerges is a real hodge-podge, a disorganized romp through time and space that in the end does not quite hang together. However, since he clearly is an interesting, witty, and insightful fellow, there is much entertainment and information to be gleaned from its pages, and I am very glad I read *Trials of the Monkey*.

I bought this book on vacation. I'm a person that frequently judges books by their covers and this one looked interesting. If it weren't good, it would be cute on my bookselves later. I read it in about 5 large chunks spread out over 3 days. Got a little preoccupied by it to be quite honest. It drew me right in.

I've reccommended it since to friends who have all thanked me. It has a lot going for it: history, personality, humor, honesty, insight. Memoirs are hit or miss, but Matthew Chapman is a genuinely intruiging person. What is different about this memoir is that it wasn't intended to be one. The author realized ultimately though, that his own story is the one that should be told. He wrote it with a sense of humor, candidness, perspective, and without being self-indulgent. It's a great, well-written story.