The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon)
You may recognize this novel’s cover from bookstore windows — I know I did — but you may not recognize the point of view of the narrator. After all, this novel is told from the perspective of an autistic boy. Writing for a parent magazine and having been a preschool teacher for years, I am relatively familiar with autism: the sensory overload, the need for pattern and, frequently, a proclivity for numbers, science or memorization. Having this basic knowledge about the condition, I never thought it would be possible to write an entire novel from the point of view of an autistic narrator. Don’t get me wrong, it can be done — The Sound and The Fury is narrated, albeit partially, by a mentally disabled man — but it is difficult to do well.
I think Mark Haddon has done it well in this tale about a young, autistic boy who decides to investigate the death of a neighborhood dog and accidentally reveals more than he bargained for about his own life. Haddon has a way of explaining autistic actions in a way that the actual suffer might have difficulty doing — why the boy hits people, how he tries (and often fails) to correctly identify emotion via facial expressions, how he gets frustrated with inexact instructions and why he feels unsafe when his routine, his environment or his idea of the world changes abruptly. I especially liked how the main character decided how his day was going to unfold by counting cars on his way to school: So many yellow cars in a row (yellow being a distasteful color) meant a rotten day and so many red cars (red being his favorite color) meant a super-special day was in store.
However, I don’t know if Haddon completely nailed it. Like I said, he described the autistic world in a way that those that have the condition are unable to. I’m of the mind that the autistic’s world is chaotic, and that they hold onto routine because they have trouble making sense of the world and their own place, their own behavior inside of it. They create artificial structure — structures that may seem silly or mundane to the rest of us — because they need something solid, no matter how mundane, to hold onto in the whirlwind of sights, smells, sounds, frightening people and events that threaten to knock the senses out of them at any time.
I just didn’t see how the narrator was able to explain that structure so well to readers. How would he understand that we “norms” don’t have that same structure? How would he see the necessity of “translating” it for us? In other words, I think such a boy wouldn’t realize that his way of seeing the world was different — it would be, to him, the ONLY way of seeing the world. Due to that, I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief that the narrator could explain himself so well on paper to “norm” society, yet couldn’t extend that logic to function “normally” in society.
But then again, I’m known to analyze too much, and I think this is one of those situations. Perhaps the boy suffers form milder autism or Asperger’s. Perhaps the narrator is influenced to clarity by the author. It doesn’t matter — it’s a great story, a story that introduces the reader to another mental universe and keeps their attention from beginning to end, sometimes eliciting out-loud belly laughs. A great read.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection
Fiction |