The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

A couple of nights ago I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, and I thought it was quite good. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I expected a less earthy story, and thought it would be more offbeat in a cutesy way. Instead, I was treated to a convincing tour of messy human lives in a messy human world, but the tour guide was someone who has a harder time understanding it than I do.

Shortly after I started reading it, I asked Kim if the central character, an autistic teenager, reminded her of me. I asked because I’ve expressed some of the same viewpoints, and I recognized myself somewhat in that character. Also, in past conversations with Kim and other friends, we’ve discussed how autism in some ways just seems to be a more extreme form of being a man—like humans occupy the whole spectrum from non-autistic to austistic, with the typical woman being in the non-autistic range, and most men ranging from slightly to notably autistic, and the people diagnosed with autism simply being moreso. (Of course, as I said, this is just autism “in some way.” I don’t know much about autism. I’m not a psychologist, but I play one in book reviews.) We had good fun one evening with a test from a magazine in which we had to look at photos of faces and identify which emotions they were exhibiting. Kim, Helga, and Barbara got most or all answers correct, whereas the two Chrises and I faired poorly; my score was dismal, and I was forced to ague that the test sucked and I was right and everyone else was wrong and why couldn’t they see that and it was all pretty stupid anyway? And another night, or maybe it was that same night, I said I couldn’t understand why a woman would have been insulted by something that Pat had said, and Helga called me a Vulcan.

Anyway, where was I? I’m out of time. It was a good book.