num_pages: 240
description: An exuberant wise and darkly funny novel about love talent ambition envy and the bungled ways we try to connect and care for each other. --Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney author of The Nest Meet Ivan and Prue: a married couple - both experts in language and communication - who nevertheless cannot seem to communicate with each otherIvan is a tightly wound philosophy professor whose reverence for logic and order governs not only his academic interests but also his closest relationships. His wife Prue is quite the opposite: a pioneer in the emerging field of biolinguistics she is bold and vibrant full of life and feeling. Thus far they have managed to weather their differences. But lately an odd distance has settled in between them. Might it have something to do with the arrival of the college's dashing but insufferable new writer-in-residence whose novel Prue always seems to be reading?Into this delicate moment barrels Ivan's unstable father-in-law Frank in town to hear Prue deliver a lecture on birdsong that is set to cement her tenure application. But the talk doesn't go as planned unleashing a series of crises that force Ivan to finally confront the problems in his marriage and to begin to fight - at last - for what he holds dear.A dazzlingly insightful and entertaining novel about the limitations of language the fragility of love and the ways we misunderstand each other and ourselves The Study of Animal Languages marks the debut of a brilliant new voice in fiction.
language: English
title: The Study of Animal Languages
publisher: Viking