Mark Haddon’s Bestseller: Good Timing or Timelessly Good?

Usually I avoid books that are on best sellers list the way I avoid haiku and rotten milk. But, this week, I impulsively picked up a copy of Mark Haddon’s The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime (Random House 2003) and cruised through it as people seem to be doing everywhere. It was giving in to a kind peer pressure, although very subtle. It’s the same sort of peer pressure that gets you to watch a movie that you know you won’t like with a group of people who have already seen it three times. The first thing I did when I opened the book was flip to the back, holding my breath, then letting out a sigh of relief to find that there was not an index of “reading group discussion questions” as happened with another contemporary bestseller The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. No matter how typical and pop-cultured you think a book or movie might be, if it happens to occupy that space that stands between a cult classic and a NY Times bestseller, it manages, eventually, to suck any avid reader in, no matter how pretentious. This is the sort of thing that happened with books by Jack Kerouac in the 60’s, Kurt Vonnegut in the 80’s and more recently Chuck Palahniuk (of course, for this we can blame modern cinema). The novel starts out with a great hook: a dead dog killed with a garden fork, and the writing is jerky and quick, single thoughts are divided up and numbered like chapters. It feels a little like you are reading someone’s online BLOG. Until you begin to realize that the narrator is not a child, but rather, Christopher who is an autistic teenager, and the numbers aren’t ordered cardinally, but rather, are all prime numbers. Let’s call this perseveration #1. The plot is introduced as Christopher sets out, using Sherlock Holmes mysteries as his model, to uncovered who murdered the neighbor’s big black poodle, Wellington.The style, tone and themes of The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime” are reminiscent of “Flowers for Algernon”. Replacing Charlie’s familiar, the lab mouse Algernon, with Christopher’s pet rat Toby. Since the word autism is never used in the book (although the about the author in the front of the book states that “As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals”), one must wonder if part of the popularity of this book comes from the rise in diagnosis, treatment and understanding of individuals with autism and aspergers syndrome in the United States and Europe (the story takes place in Swindon, England). If the label “autistic” had never been applied to this story would it have reached the platform of “national bestseller” or would it have remained among the ranks of “staff recommendations”? Character development is always interesting when the narrator has an atypical way of viewing the world. We are only privy to the traits the narrator feels are important. Haddon does a smooth job of finding ways for Christopher to undergo adventures, discover secrets, and describe his world to the reader without betraying any of the limitations or mere differences to the average person his “behavioral problems”, as other characters in the book refer to his autism, provide him with.One of the delights of reading a story with a narrator like Christopher is that you slip into thinking you are listening to a child, and the next moment, as if you’ve stumbled across a tripwire you feel like you are listening to a lecture from someone who far exceeds your own mental capabilities, and they are using their talking-to-a-child-voice, and you are the child.As his search for the dog-killer progressed, Christopher’s social and cognitive abnormalities lead him to uncover clues to a mystery he had no idea existed. He unwittingly unveils the nature and secrets of those around him. Depending on your personal philosophies on life and literature, you’ll find the ending either intolerable or inspiring.”The curious incident of the dog in the night-time” is definitely a page turner. The kind of book whose story is interesting and clear enough to be read on a plane, train, or at home on a lonely Saturday night. It’s an example of a book that is easily digestible if you are looking for movie-like entertainment. But it can also be, to continue the film analogy, an artsy indy film classic, with several other themes popping up through the grass of mediocrity.