I don’t read a lot of fiction, because usually I find it upsetting. An author sets up some characters and gets you all interested in them, and then makes terrible things happen to them. I told that to a guy I worked with, and he pointed out that bad things happen to people in non-fiction books, too. “But those are real people, they’re not invented specifically to make you care about them,” I said. I don’t think he understood the distinction, but it makes a difference to me.

Anyway, in the last few years I have found a little sub-genre of fiction that I enjoy: novels written as if by people with neurological disorders. First was
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, 1999). This is the story of Lionel Essrog, an orphan with Tourette’s syndrome who tries to solve the murder of Frank Minna, his employer, mentor, and friend. I liked the experience of seeing the Brooklyn I knew though Lionel’s eyes. The depiction of Tourette’s felt accurate, and didn’t seem as if it were just a gimmick or even just a metaphor. The writing was excellent, and the story was satisfying. (I still smile at the memory of the two old dons, Brickface and Stucco.) I discussed
Motherless Brooklyn on my WFMU
book club show on August 14 and 21, 2002—which seems incredible, since it was so long ago. One caller explained the name Essrog to me, and I’ve always wondered if that was Jonathan Lethem himself, but I’ve never found out. (Update 4/3: It wasn't Lethem, it was Listener Bruce! That's good to know, after all this time.)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Doubleday, 2003), by Mark Haddon, was the next one I read. The story is narrated by Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old autistic boy. Although Christopher enjoys Sherlock Holmes stories, he says he hates novels because “they are lies about things which didn’t happen.” Exactly. When Christopher discovers his neighbor’s Poodle impaled by a pitchfork, he sets out to solve the gruesome crime. Through his atypical approach to the world, Christopher discovers—and solves—another, deeper mystery having to do with his mother and the story of her death. Even when Christopher himself doesn’t understand what he’s describing, the reader is able to fill in the gaps. Apparently Haddon used to work with autistic children so he knows what he’s writing about. Luckily, he’s such a good writer that Christopher never comes off as merely a representation of his condition. In fact, the book doesn’t seem like a lie at all.

Last summer I came across
Remainder, by Tom McCarthy (Random House, 2007) on the “buy-2-get-1-free” table at Posman Books. The unnamed British narrator has suffered a traumatic brain injury in an accident in which something fell from the sky and landed on him. When he receives a large settlement, he has enough money to begin constructing and re-enacting visions he thinks are memories and incidents he witnesses on the street. At first this seems rather charming, but it becomes less so as the story progresses. I wondered whether the accident was supposed to have disabled some moral filter in his scrambled brain, or whether absolute power corrupts absolutely, or what. On the other hand, I wasn’t surprised that the narrator’s hired help went along with facilitating his plans for as long as he had the money to pay them.
Remainder’s narrator, like the one in
Sunset Boulevard, turns out not really to have been able to tell the story but, as in the movie, it doesn’t much matter. I liked that the book is kind of prickly and left me with things to think about, and I liked that it was first published by a small French house because nobody in England would touch it.

As of this morning I’m reading
Lowboy, by John Wray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). It’s the story of a 16-year-old paranoid schizophrenic running away on the B train, and so far I like it even though it’s not a first-person narrative. One thing I like a lot is the way Wray introduces his characters. I like that he never tells you their race, which is pretty unusual in the recent American novels I’ve read. Okay, I haven’t read that many, but still. I just hope he doesn’t have one of those “I’m tired of writing now” endings. That’s another reason I stopped reading modern novels.(Update: The ending was no surprise, but at least there was an ending. If I saw Lowboy on the train, I'd still move to a different car.)
One reason I do read fiction, when I do read it, is to experience a different world or to experience the world in a different way, and all four of these books allow that. Some TV shows do, too. There’s Monk, of course, although I don’t think the writers worry a whole lot about the accurate depiction of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But it’s entertaining. There was also a medical series called 3 Lbs., which probably should have been called 3 Weeks because that’s how long it was on before the network yanked it. I really liked that show because it featured a continuing character with prosopagnosia. I thought the writers did a pretty good job of depicting face-blindness. I watched the last episode with some friends, and apparently there was a scene where the face-blind guy got into an elevator and everyone else in the elevator had the same face. My friends had to explain that to me, because I couldn’t tell.
I think probably only a neuro-typical (NT) person could ever write a book that tries to get inside the head of someone whose neurology is not normal. Temple Grandin writes fine books, and she’s autistic, but her books aren’t about the experience of being autistic and how it differs from not being autistic, because she’s never been not-autistic so she never could explain it. It takes an NT to imagine what it’s like to be different; we who are different can’t explain what the difference is. It’s like asking a blind person to describe blindness—how can they, if they’ve never known what vision is like? Luckily, sighted people can close their eyes and get some feeling for it. But if you want to know what it’s like to have Tourette’s syndrome, or autism, or a traumatic brain injury, you should read these books.
Thanks for reading my blog post this week, and may God bless.
I bought Motherless Brooklyn on the strength of your book-club show devoted to it, and enjoyed it enough to buy a second copy as a gift for someone way before either her birthday or Christmas. I just felt she needed to have it. The effect of the Prince tune "Kiss" on the protagonist and his Tourette's was fascinating, and one of those details that made me, too, believe that Lethem had done his homework on the syndrome.
Posted by: Listener James from Westwood | March 30, 2009 at 09:18 PM
have you read Flowers for Algernon?
Posted by: Tim | March 30, 2009 at 09:46 PM
I would recommend "Silver-My Own Tale as Told By Me With A Goodly Amount Of Murder", which purports to be the autobiography of Long John Silver of Treasure Island fame. The catch is that Silver is not the lovable rogue that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about but a scheming sociopath. Strangely, it is a very scary and very funny book. The book is written from Silver's point of view.
Posted by: Charlene Pederson | March 30, 2009 at 09:55 PM
picked up motherless in a junk store on roosevelt island and loaned it to everyone i knew.
so what is the signifigance of 'essrog?'
Posted by: craig | March 31, 2009 at 12:15 AM
Essrog--usually spelled esrog--is a fruit used symbolically in the celebration of the Jewish festival of Succoth. As for the significance of it in the book, there's lots of speculation and you can look it up and decide for yourself.
Of course I've read "Flowers for Algernon," Listener Tim, because I was once a junior-high-school girl. I thought about whether or not to include it, but decided it wasn't quite the same as the others--not a first-person narrative, character is retarded, then smart, then retarded again, and the condition is seen as somehow tragic. In the other books, the conditions are seen more as just differences, different ways of perceiving the world. When I read "Flowers for Algernon," I thought it was wrong for the girlfriend to dump him when he wasn't intelligent anymore--how important is intelligence to a person's true character, their inner soul? What is it that makes you love someone? It was partly because of that book that I dated a retarded guy for a while, although Sluggo doesn't like me to talk about it.
Posted by: Bronwyn C. | March 31, 2009 at 09:40 AM
I'm currently reading Temple Grandin's book -Thinking In Pictures-, and recommend it highly. It's true that she doesn't describe the differences between being autistic and non-autistic, but in this book she does describe in great detail her thinking process (which, as the title suggests, is highly visual) and means of understanding information, and how she has learned that her means of understanding are quite different from those of non-autistic people. It's fascinating.
Another book about autism I've found illuminating is Paul Collins' -Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism-. Collins writes about the experience of discovering that his young son is autistic, and he uses that experience to write about the history of autism as a recognized medical condition (suprisingly, according to Collins, as recently as the 50's, autism was thought to be the result of bad parenting, not genetics). I learned about Temple Grandin's writing from Collins' book.
Posted by: James | March 31, 2009 at 10:16 AM
It wasn't Jonathan Lethem who called you that day, it was just me, listener Bruce.
Posted by: Listener Bruce | March 31, 2009 at 08:57 PM
My comment vanished, so I will redo. Who is this Sluggo that you speak of?
Posted by: Thijs R. | April 01, 2009 at 07:18 PM
Sorry, Listener Thijs. Sluggo's my husband, and he doesn't like me talking about my old boyfriends. (I think some of them were quite amusing, though.)
Posted by: Bronwyn C. | April 02, 2009 at 11:29 AM
Two recommendations:
THE DOCTOR IS ILL by Anthony Burgess
FISHER'S HORNPIPE by Todd McEwen
I'd never steer you wrong.
Best,
Eternal Reader, Occasional Listener and Former Assistant Mike
Posted by: Mike B. | April 05, 2009 at 07:09 PM