The Evolution Man, or, How I Ate My Father
- Sep 29, 2024
- 3 min read
★★★★★
Until we moved to Hilltop a little over a year ago, it had been the better part of a decade since all our books were out on shelves and accessible all at once. We don’t have some Edwardian estate library, but we do have more books than the average American household, which, rightly or wrongly, I peg at a figure close to zero. We haven’t always lived in homes with ample bookshelf space or been in places long enough to build, buy, or otherwise acquire the necessary shelving. The same holds true for my record collection, though it has shrunk by some seven or eight hundred over the past few years as I have been selling off LPs in earnest. But I digress. My point is, now that all our books are out and visible, if still poorly organized, I am finally taking the opportunity to reread what we've got to make sure they still hold muster and deserve to remain on the shelf. Due to its short length (I was hoping to fit something in before an interlibrary loan request came through), I selected Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man, or, How I Ate My Father first.
I was given The Evolution Man by my ex back before she was my ex. There’s a good chance we were still in college and dating and she hadn’t yet gone off to grad school at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. So, it’s been nearly thirty years, give or take, since I last read it, which is about half the number of years since it was originally published (1960). I don’t recall if she said anything other than, “I think you’d like this,” including how she knew about Roy Lewis generally or this book specifically. She was the youngest of eight kids who had been exposed to a huge swath of film and literature that I as the oldest of seven across two families and only 17 years younger than my parents had not. Or: She came from a highly literate and academic family, and I did not.
The Evolution Man is a first-hand account narrated by one of the sons in an upwardly mobile hominin family in the late Pleistocene. Anachronistically literate and acutely aware of (and concerned for) their place in geologic time, the father is a restless (and sometimes reckless) experimenter constantly pushing his horde of archaic humans firmly in the direction of Homo Sapiens. Here we see the family, amongst other things, discover fire, invent the bow and arrow, attempt to domesticate dogs, create representational art, learn to cook meat, and introduce exogamy.
Of course, not everybody is on board with such advancements, most notably Uncle Vanya, who comes down from the trees from time to time to scold everyone for “going against nature.” Father, having none of this, is all in for the betterment of the species, and it is his quickness to share their newfound—and proprietary—knowledge with others (especially concerning fire) that brings matters to a head between him and the rest of the family. Lest I introduce spoilers, I’ll say no more about this delightful and delightfully quirky novel that was, I am very happy to report, every bit as good as the first time I read it.
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