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Vacation reading

No one asked, but in between doing this and doing that in France, I read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I picked up from Shakespeare and Co. on the banks of the Seine (a tourist thing to do, I’m told, but (a) I was a tourist, and (b) I wanted to read the book, so I’m not feeling too conflicted about this), and J. M. Coetzee’s latest, Elizabeth Costello, which one of Janet’s former graduate students gave to her and which I yoinked (Nick’s verb-- should be self-explanatory) once I’d finished Haddon.  So here’s my book report.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Haddon novel.  I’d heard a great deal about it, of course, because it’s narrated by a 15-year-old young man with Asperger’s syndrome, and in disability circles, especially where those circles overlap with literary-criticism circles (producing really tiny shaded areas in the Venn diagram of Haddon’s readership), it was much talked about when it was published last year.  I’m in the process of finishing an essay on cognitive disability and its relation to narrative, especially with regard to characters whose cognitive disabilities prevent them from understanding the principles of the narrative they inhabit, so Haddon’s book was professionally interesting on that score even though Christopher John Francis Boone, its narrator, is no Benjy Compson.  He not only understands narrative features like “digression,” but is in fact an enthusiastic reader of murder mysteries, and as many theorists before me have noted, detective fiction is almost always recursive, rewarding those characters in the narrative who are the most capable readers of the tropes of detective fiction.  And Christopher knows quite well that he’s writing a murder mystery himself, so Christopher’s a fairly “high-functioning” disabled narrator, as such characters go.

But quite apart from the piddling question of how I could put The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to work for me in my day job, I was simply caught up in the plot:  once Christopher finds those letters (and that’s all I’ll say about the novel’s major pivot, for those of you who plan to read the book soon and don’t want crucial plot devices given away on some guy’s blog), I couldn’t stop reading until I found out what happened next.  You know, the most basic and least sophisticated of readerly impulses:  and then what happened?  and then what happened?  and then?  (This kept me going all the way to will he pass his math test?) Again, I won’t tell you any of what happened, but I will say that the question of whether Christopher gets to his mother’s house is rendered exceptionally complex by the terms of his disability, so that the most trivial and mundane aspects of travel become not only narratable but strange and urgent.  One of the things this feature of the book does, then, is to make apparent to us what kinds of complicated cognitive operations we execute whenever we get on a train, which is to say that Haddon makes the familiar unfamiliar with regard not only to mundane aspects of travel but mundane aspects of narrative itself.  Which is, all told, pretty cool.  (Some of you will know that I’m referring here to Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s definition of “literariness” as a mode of “defamiliarization” that renews perception and “makes the stone stony.” For a brief explanation, check this out. For those of you for whom the Russian formalists are extremely old news, remember, this was not a definition of “literature” but of “literariness,” and eventually opened the door to the analysis of every kind of textuality, once people finally gave up trying to distinguish “literary” from “ordinary” language on the basis of the “intrinsic” features of each.) And there’s nothing cloying or sentimental about the book, either, none of the drama of pity or horror characteristic of manipulative “disability” narratives.  As for the psychological phenomenon of reading about a developmentally-disabled teenager who has a great memory and loves Indian food while travelling with a developmentally-disabled 12-year-old who has a great memory and loves Indian food, well, it was weird.  But Jamie’s nothing like Christopher in other respects.

Domestic tasks call.  If I get to Elizabeth Costello today I’ll append it to this post.  If not, Coetzee will get his own heading tomorrow.  Short verdict:  interesting in places but kind of bloodless, with one especially annoying feature that pops up here and there and, for me, torpedoes the final chapter altogether.

Posted by on 07/03 at 04:57 AM

  1. Aha, I just finished the same book.  I loved it as well, but hesitated because I had no idea how realistic the depiction of the disability was.  But the defamiliarization (so happy to now know the technical term) was extremely powerful; the urge to yell “look at a map!” during the trip to London is overpowering.  Christopher’s perfect logic in some circumstances and perfect lack of logic in others makes you wonder how we would appear to a hypothetical race of perfectly reasonable beings.

    Posted by Sean  on  07/03  at  08:58 AM

  2. Sorry, some under-caffeinated person mistyped my URL in the previous comment.

    Posted by Sean  on  07/03  at  09:00 AM

  3. Thanks for acquainting those of us less engaged in the more arcane habits of your profession with literary theory we can be instructed by when we delve into some of the more modern efforts.  You have already opened some doors for me.  The diversity of your subject matter in your blog is a constant source of amazement and entertainment to me.

    Posted by  on  07/04  at  08:38 PM

  4. Thanks, T.C.  We try to keep it diverse on this here humble blog.  And Sean, good to hear from you-- glad you liked the novel too.  But just one thing-- Christopher does buy himself a map, once he gets off the Underground at Willesden Junction. . . .

    And early on, he does a nice synopsis of Olber’s Paradox, doesn’t he?

    Posted by  on  07/07  at  01:49 PM

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