Curiouser And

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, was a bit of a literary phenomenon when it came out a few years ago, and its been on my too read list (at the behest of my well-read parents) for most of that time, but I only just got around to it. Curious Incident is told from the perspective of 15 year old Christopher Boone, who, after discovering the corpse of his neighbor's recently deceased dog, Wellington, sets about to solve the murder mystery. The catch, and this is quite the catch, is that Christopher is austistic. He is excellent at maths, science, and problem solving, but (like many ausitic kids) does not like to be touched, doesn't process or read emotion the way most people do, and is prone to very specific needs--he dislikes yellow and brown things, he loves timetables and dislikes deviating from them, he doesn't like crowds, etc. As Christopher explores the mystery, using his own unique skills and running into some huge unique roadblocks, it ends up revealing a much bigger mystery that is much more important to him. If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it here.

The main draw of this book, both when it came out and upon reading it, is the chance to get inside the head of a unique narrator. Like the oft-discussed Black Swan Green, Haddon's novel is told entirely from its teenager narrator's perspective, and the book lives or dies depending on the success of that particular element. Obviously Christopher Boone is very different from the other child-narrators on this blog, and while Haddon does provide some great insight into how the thought process of a high-functioning austic teen might work, its hard to know exactly how much he nails it. I have some limited experience with autism and autistic kids, but part of what is so fascinating and frustrating about autism is that their minds do seem to function so differently than ours, and no amount of research could yield a product that is 100% accurate, or so it seems to this particular skeptic. The book has a lot going for it, as a quick, quirky read (and I must shout out to a post-modern trick I do love, that of including tables and diagrams and charts amongst the narrative. Please see Special Topics in Calamity Physics for this as well) but it never felt more than that, not even given the fact that the day I started it I was assigned as a sub to be the one-on-one aid for two autistic kids. However, if you have read both Black Swan Green and the much beloved by some (but, sorry, inferior to me) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and enjoyed the perspective and heartstring tugging, this is probably another book for you.