Animal instinct’s wordy realm

Animal instinct’s wordy realm
(San Francisco Chronicle)
Review of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature

Apparently, even love is a genetic adaptation. Thus, from the works of Homer through Shakespeare to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Twain, Faulkner, Austen, Joyce, Nabokov, Steinbeck and right up to Kundera, Marquez, Alice Walker and even Charles Bukowski, the storylines, however poetic, convoluted, steamy or spiritual, are really about the rules of the jungle—or desert, or boardroom or bedroom or anywhere the struggle for survival takes place—even though most authors have been largely unaware they are being guided to some degree by the “evolutionary bottom line.”