The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
To some degree, this is a great book. The character is less a character than an amalgamation of a set of characteristics meant to be autistic. The writing of course, takes us out of that because Haddon, while speaking in first person, says too much to be a truly autistic narrator. What I mean is that Haddon explains more than someone with autism would, and that kind of attention to the reader combined with an inattention to the characters by the narrator is a disjoint that is distasteful.
Still, he tries hard to show us what it’s like. The book is amusing and touching just as it is contrived — that the characters of father, mother, and so on all behave in what we can see are constrained ways meant to drive the plot more than anything else. In a sense, the world is a foil for autism. This isn’t a difficult book to read but to some degree it was a little tiresome. I think Haddon would have done a little better to write from outside the narrator’s point of view, although this would have been harder to pull off in terms of sympathy.
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