Amy-Renee beat everyone to the punchline on last month’s GAMBLE review.  I finished the book very early in the month, in about two sittings, but I will admit to procrastinating on the review.  But let me be absolutely clear – it isn’t because I didn’t enjoy the book. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time is, admittedly, an odd little book.  It is written by a children’s book author, but it is not a children’s book.  It is classified under Mysteries, but it is not really a mystery.  Instead it is a quick-reading quirky little commentary on human drama told from the point of view of an autistic teenager.  And it was the clarity of that narration that captivated me.

One of the defining features of almost all spectrum disorders is the impaired ability to empathize.  More precisely, the autistic person has a difficult time interpreting the emotional state of the “other” by non-verbal cues, and an equally hard time grasping the concept that other people have different knowledge bases than their own.  The subtleties of human communication must be “taught” to autistics;  they are not born with the hardwiring necessary to develop them on their own.  Autism, because of what it tells us about human socialization, has always fascinated me.  For a readable explanation of recent theories, get your hands on a copy of Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism from the November 2006 edition of  Scientific American.  If you don’t have access to a hard copy, purchase the full version of the article online – it’s well worth it.  (As an aside, one of the authors of the article is also the author of the upcoming GAMBLE selection, Phantoms in the Brain).

But what intrigued me about the book was NOT the insight it offered into the autistic mind (which I have heard is excellent, coming from people who specialize in such things), but, rather, the insight it offers into the behavior of the rest of us “regular” folks.  It takes someone who cannot understand the nuances of what we take to be “normal” human behavior to reveal,  in the starkest terms, how maddeningly contradictory our species is.  I am amazed that ANY of us grow up with the ability to navigate the emotional and social mine fields of adulthood, because we seem to make everything so incredibly complicated.  I don’t wonder if we took a step back and divorced ourselves from our intention and took a good-hard look at the way we act, and then assume that everyone has to deduce our intent solely from our actions, if we wouldn’t be far better people as a result.  I often think we use the excuse of “I didn’t MEAN it THAT way” to excuse ourselves from the hurt we inadvertently cause others, rather than simply saying “I’m sorry” and trying to actually think before we act.

And it’s amazing how much perspective you can really gain from a person who, by definition, is capable of only one.