Tuesday, May 09, 2006

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time"

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9 comments:

kc said...

By the time I got to page 158 last night I was overwhelmed with the conviction that I could not handle being the parent of an autistic child, even if he were awesome at math.

But possibly if he were awesome at sarcasm. Do any autistic kids excel in that? Because that would go a long way toward mitigating the headbanging and the groaning and the fear of being touched.

9:14 AM, May 10, 2006
Ben said...

I think autistic children usually don't understand sarcasm.

12:49 PM, May 10, 2006
kc said...

I usually don't understand sarcasm either. That's why it would be so great if my autistic child did. That would be something useful he could share with me. Like it would be way more useful than having a short person standing around doing quadratic equations in his head all the time. Whom does that help, exactly?

I would also not mind an autistic kid whose "autistic specialty," if you will, was being a really awesome cook.

D'oh! I probably just dropped myself into a lower ring of Hell for making light of people with disabilities.

I do like this book. I like the Siobhan character and the way she is presented, the way she is the authoritative voice in the book, the moral center, even though her actual presence is very minor.

1:19 PM, May 10, 2006
george said...

Well, there was that autistic kid whowas in the news recently because he scored a bunch of points at the end of a basketball game. He even got to meet W. for it.

Did you know Robert's two kids are autistic? The Tulsa World even did a story on his family.

1:58 PM, May 10, 2006
Ben said...

The basketball kid is quite a bit higher-functioning than the protagonist in this book.

And not all autistic people are savants. Some have no area of special abilities and some have several. (They do all have special areas of interest, though.) The basketball kid did not have any special abilities, if I remember correctly. He plays basketball all the time, and he is an okay shooter, but he got a hot streak at the perfect time.

And their intelligence varies a lot. If the protagonist in this book were given an accomodating IQ test, I would guess that this protagonist would be slightly below average in verbal IQ and genius-level in performance IQ. But many autistics are far below average in each. And a few actually have high verbal IQs.

3:17 PM, May 10, 2006
kc said...

Ben, one might conclude that autism is your special area of interest. How do you know so much about it??

3:24 PM, May 10, 2006
kc said...

George, I did not know that Robert's kids were autistic. Robert is a designer where George works. Could you send me the story? I did read recently that if you have one autistic kid your chances of having another are pretty high. How do you distinguish autism from good old geekiness?

3:28 PM, May 10, 2006
Erin said...

FYI, the author said Christopher has Asperger's.

Author Q&A

3:31 PM, May 10, 2006
kc said...

Interesting interview, Erin. I wonder why Christopher never talks about his "condition" in any other way except by reference to his special classes at school. He never calls himself autistic or says he has Asperger's. It's a nice touch. It could bog the book down in explanation. And part of the author's point, as he says, is to make the narrator a human being with an interesting story to tell rather than a "case study."

I think the fork in the dog is a classic murder mystery maneuver. The bizarre detail. But the author said it was "funny," like haha. I missed the humor in that, though.

4:45 PM, May 10, 2006

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