I'm sure everyone out there knows someone with some degree of autism, and it's fascinating and incomprehensible. I just read in a magazine article the other night that "One in 166 children in the US are diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder today, as compared to one in 10,000 in the 1980s." I wanted to understand more about it, and I came across this novel, "The Speed of Dark," by Elizabeth Moon.
Plot summary
Lou is a bioinformatics specialist, and high-functioning autistic, who has made a good life for himself. A new manager at the firm where he works puts pressure on the department where many autistic people work. Lou is pressured to undergo an experimental treatment that might "cure" his autism. Lou does not think he needs curing, but he risks losing his job and other accommodations the company has put in place for its autistic employees.
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I'm about 60 pages in and I'm getting this creeping fear that the book's going to turn into "Flowers for Algernon." If it DOES turn into "Flowers for Algernon," I will throw the book out the window and into the muck, and then I will be fined a bazillion dollars by the library system for ruining their depressing book, and then I wander the streets poverty-stricken looking for a happy ending, and then I will throw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge.
And Wynne will have this on her conscience.
The premise of the book is very interesting and very timely. In fact, it's a topic that I've had on my mind quite a bit in the last couple months (how society longs to "normalize" the autistic) so it will be interesting to explore. I have great hope for it that it will not leave me twitching in the Ditch of Despair. However, at this early stage it does seem to be inhabited almost exclusively by two kinds of characters: pure-hearted politically correct do-gooders and black-souled villains twisting their greasy moustaches and plotting the demise of all autistic folk. But Lou is great, and I've got my eye on that conflicted guy with the brother Jeremy. He could be interesting. I hope he gets more screen time.
I've never read "Flowers for Algernon." Is that about an autistic person, too? Um, anyway, I just finished the book about five minutes ago, and the ending left me...
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SPOILER ALERT--SERIOUSLY, DO NOT READ IF YOU'RE NOT FINISHED
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...absolutely elated. Glowing. I learned to love Lou so much, that when he gets to the end, I am so thrilled that he's still there--both of him.
Even if Lou had decided not to get the cure, if he had decided he was fine as he was, that would have been great, because I loved him for who he was. But the fact that he took a risk, a huge one, and won, and ended up fulfilling a childhood dream--oh, my heavens, well, talk about your warm and fuzzy feelings.
I love how much hope there is in this book. I love the thought that anyone can change, if they want to, and even if they don't want to. I don't agree with all of the ideas in here, of course, but I love how the author shows Lou's thinking process and how he arrives at some of those ideas, and how marvelous they are! (And I don't understand, no matter how slowly and carefully I read it, about the speed of dark. Just had to take Lou's word for it.) The author did a brilliant job showing us inside his head, and especially, for showing the wonder of the world through an autist's eyes. One of my favorite parts is Lou in the park enjoying his last day with his "excessive and unregulated senses."
I love the wonder of it. I'd like to enjoy licking a tree, I think.
Aaaand I'm glad it didn't work out with Marjory, too--I'm glad the ending wasn't that neat. I don't know how to explain that, but I was afraid if they had lived happily ever after, it would've been...too much a fairy tale, and Lou is too real for that.
I could burble on happily and endlessly about this, but really, anyone else have something to say?
Hurray! No Algernon! Flowers for Algernon was a book I had to read in junior high about a mentally retarded man who takes part in an experimental procedure to raise his IQ and falls in love, becomes very intelligent, and then... sadness. It was a great book, but I'm grateful this one had a different ending. Like you two, I was so shocked at the turn the book took. I think that if the author hadn't had the creds of having raised and loved an autistic son, she would have been booed off the stage for suggesting that maybe trying to be normal was the best thing for any or all of the autists in the book. She would have been accused of not appreciating their strengths, intrinsic value, etc. It was a refreshing angle -- one that I saw again tonight in my favorite TV show, House M.D., when Dr. House tells a mother who is a dwarf that she should get over her suspicion of "normal" people and convince her daughter, whose smallness is curable, to take the pills that will make her a normal height. It was so different from the politically correct lines you usually get fed. Of course, there was an earlier episode of House M.D. in which Dr. House longed to be an autistic person so that he could have a good excuse for dispensing with social niceties:
"See, skinny, socially privileged white people get to draw this neat little circle, and everyone inside the circle is normal and anyone outside the circle should be beaten, broken and reset so they can be brought into the circle. Failing that, they should be institutionalized or, worse, pitied. ... Why would you feel sorry for someone who gets to opt out of the inane courteous formalities which are utterly meaningless insincere and therefore degrading? ... Can you imagine how liberating it would be to live a life free of all the mind numbing social niceties? I don't pity this kid, I envy him."
So there are the polar opinions of Dr. House on the topic of being "normal." But he's a jerk, so why do I listen to him at all? :)
I think overall I appreciated the direction the book went -- besides being novel, I think it embraced possibilities that we are afraid of because we think they automatically disenfranchise those who fall outside the realm of the "normal." I liked that the decision wasn't safe -- one or more of his friends who tried the treatment got burned, and I liked that there were those who decided not to take the treatement and were also happy with their decision to remain autistic. It covered all the bases, even while shooting Lou to the stars.
However, when I reached the end of the book, I still felt like Lou's world was populated by and large with Evil People and Good People, with only a couple of In Between People. Don was off the charts ridiculous, especially when you throw Mr. Crenshaw into the same universe. By the same token, Tom, Lucia, Marjory, the policeman downstairs were too enlightened/educated/unflaggingly good to be believed. I LOVED the character of Mr. Aldrin. He was the only character besides Lou who had any inner turmoil; who was of two minds. I loved that he was very ready to sell his soul for security and then finally took a risk to do what he felt was right and that his path was not a foregone conclusion.
I also loved the church sequence. I admit that as interesting as it was seeing the world from an autistic viewpoint, some of Lou's regular goings and comings and "endearing quirks" got tiresome by the middle of the book. The church scene suddenly made Lou a fully realized human to me and it was quite stunning in the themes it presented and the way Lou's thinking unfolded on the topic of illness and the psychology behind either wanting or not wanting to change when offered the possibility of healing. It even gave me things to think about vis a vis my own spiritual rigidness. Good scene. I also liked the segment where he was rediscovering the world after his treatment -- the author did a great job throughout the book at creating the world anew through the eyes of those whose experience is foreign to us, but especially in that segment.
The book ended too suddenly, I felt. Not that you can take chapters and chapters to travel with him through his advanced education and into the stars, but I had barely had a chance to adjust to the new Lou and suddenly we fast forward years, and then even more suddenly the book is over. I don't know the solution (or if there even is one), since the main tension of the book is whether or not he will decide to be normal, and so of course once he's made that decision, the book needs to head toward its ending. But I did feel like the new Lou had no time for me, who had been his companion for 300 some-odd pages. Maybe a solution would have been not giving us the distant future. Maybe it would have been enough for him to explore his new self a bit more inwardly in the days and weeks after he came to, and decide whether or not he liked it, regardless of whether it got him what he wanted (a career in space)? But that would have been frustrating as well, just in a different way.
Overall, a great book. Gave me a lot to think about, both on the hot topic of medical ethics and on the issue of change in general (physical, mental, and spritual). I'm glad I read it.
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