Roughly 40 years ago in Pasadena, in an apartment court dating from the Ray­mond Chandler era, I heard T. C. Boyle read his story “Ike and Nina,” purporting to give a former staffer’s account of an improbable attraction between President Eisenhower and the wife of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was T. Coraghessan Boyle in those early days, a theatrical figure with a name to match; I’d been reading him since his first stories appeared in little magazines. Some writers are good readers of their own fiction; more are not. Boyle is one of the best I’ve ever heard, not least because he relishes the art of performance. After all, a story, let alone a novel, is nothing if not a sustained performance, though a lot of writers, oddly enough, seem not to grasp this basic fact. Boyle gets it, always has, and that comes through on the page. (If you want to check out “Ike and Nina,” it appeared in Boyle’s second book of stories, Greasy Lake, a quintessential Boyle title; it’s also included in the first volume of his collected stories.)

Never remotely Panglossian, Boyle’s sense of the human prospect has grown ever more dire over the years, and that trajectory continues in his latest novel. Sardonic, beautifully paced, calculatedly outrageous at points, as Boyle’s fiction typically is, Talk to Me is also suffused with disgust, not merely for some particular aspect of human folly (here, especially, treatment of primates) but for the very idea of “humanity” as somehow special, set apart from other creatures.

Novelists have different strategies for letting readers know when the action of a particular book takes place. Some give specific dates in the text, as Mark Twain does on the first page of the first chapter of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Some refer to contemporaneous events to provide time-markers. Readers may draw different conclusions. Publishers Weekly’s re­viewer (July 19, 2021) tells us that the action of Talk to Me takes place “in the mid-1980s.” This seems unlikely.

The first chapter of the novel is titled “To Tell the Truth,” which happens to be the name of a TV show that old people like me (in their seventies) are likely to remember; its last season was 1978–79. Here’s how the chapter begins:

She wasn’t studying. Studying was what she was supposed to be doing, what she intended to do, what she was going to start doing any minute now. First, though, she had to wait for the album to finish — the new Talking Heads, with its bass-heavy rendition of “Take Me to the River,” which she couldn’t get enough of . . .

That song by the Talking Heads (based on Al Green’s song of the same title, but not precisely a cover of it as some sources wrongly imply; we’ll return to it in a bit) appeared on their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, which was released in July 1978. So the young college student with whom the novel begins (we’ll soon learn her name: Aimee Villard) is listening to the album sometime after that date, when it is still “new” or at least newish.

After the album finishes, we’re told, Aimee starts “click[ing] through all the channels on her TV” (anything to defer hitting the books), and it is thus that all the subsequent events of the novel are set in motion: She stumbles on the latest episode of To Tell the Truth, in which each of the three contestants tries to persuade the show’s celebrity panelists that he really is Guy Schermerhorn, a re­searcher at the California university Aimee is attending, “who, he claimed, was teaching chimps to talk” via sign language (or “signing,” as we would say). After the real Guy Schermerhorn gets all but one of the panelists’ votes (Aimee instantly knew he was the right one), there is a surprise: Guy’s prize subject, a chimp named Sam, appears onstage, and he and Guy engage in conversation, much to the delight of the panelists and the studio crowd. Aimee is smitten, both with Guy and with Sam, and several days later, she is in Guy’s office, applying for a (very) low-level job as a lab assistant.

From this first chapter, all the subsequent events of the novel flow implacably (and ridiculously). It’s like a master class in the art of fiction: taking time-honored notions of “fate” and “destiny” and torquing them until they are almost, but not quite, unrecognizable. And this isn’t merely (“merely”!) a bravura exercise in “technique”: It embodies the argument of the novel, the full-out assault that Boyle makes on “human exceptionalism” in all its forms, no quarter granted.

For not a few readers, what I have said so far will be enough to get the message across: “This isn’t a book for me.” Some others — a few, at least — will have resolved to order a copy immediately. But what about those still on the fence? Well, you should know (you may already have gathered) that if you have come to this novel looking for what some call “sympathetic” characters (a notion duly mocked by some vigilant members of the literary police), you have come to the wrong place.

Guy Schermerhorn! After seeing his name, do you need to be told that he is a repulsive figure, equally weak and craven? (Like Evelyn Waugh, among others, Boyle has a genius for character names.) Aimee is more sympathetic, yet in the end, Boyle’s treatment of her is clinical (he’s not trying to win our hearts). And Sam? Even as he mounts his ferocious assault on what he regards as the intolerable pretensions of “humanity” writ large, Boyle — very much to his credit, and in contrast to many who will cheer his takedown of “the human” — refuses to sentimentalize his chimp prodigy, who (like Aimee) has his charms but who is also, you could say, human, all too human. (Longtime Boyle readers will be reminded of the title story of his first collection, Descent of Man, published in 1979.)

Now back to the Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River” (a great song, which I listened to repeatedly, for the first time in decades, while reading Talk to Me). The Al Green original mixes the idioms of the contemporary (c. early 1970s) love song with imagery of baptism, so rich in black Christianity:

Take me to the river
And wash me down
Won’t you cleanse my soul
Put my feet on the ground

In their version, the Talking Heads subtly alter that idiom:

Take me to the river, drop me in the water

Take me to the river, dip me in the water

Washing me down, washing me down

Drop me in the water! That “drop” gets repeated with special emphasis; there’s a wonderful live version of the song on YouTube that shows how the band at once “secularizes” the song thoroughly while at the same time performing it as if enacting a ritual. (“She didn’t believe,” we’re told of Aimee, “but at the same time she did. Religion was superstition, was fear, but at least it provided answers.”) Very near the end of the book, a chapter begins (again) with Aimee listening to this song. Pay attention when a novelist does that.

Which reminds me of one of the most memorable scenes in this novel, not long before its tragic-absurd conclusion: A rather enigmatic Catholic priest, who shows up late in the going, comes to the trailer in the trailer court where Aimee is hiding out with Sam, to baptize this prodigy. I’d love to quote it in full, but you’ll have to look it up yourself. As long as blasphemy is hip, faith is still kicking, hasn’t yet been consigned to the trash heap.