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7:43am July 5, 2014
sublimestupidity asked: Have you read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"? If you have, do you think the author succeeded at writing from the first person perspective of a boy who has asperger like qualities? What is your opinion on the book?

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/89556836070/realsocialskills-anonymous-said

Also this is a review I wrote on another website:

I didn’t really like this book.

I’m autistic, and I don’t always expect a lot from autistic characters. While they never name that this character is autistic, it’s clear from every detail in the book that he was intended as an autistic character, and that’s what I read him as. But like many autistic characters, he’s written all wrong. Autistic people are not nearly-emotionless alien robots who are driven so much by “logic” that we don’t actually make a single decision for ourselves throughout the entire book. Even the most hyper-rational autistic people – and I’ve known hundreds of autistic people – are not like Christopher in that respect. They may use logic a lot, but they are not driven by it to the point that they never make their own decisions. Christopher doesn’t make decisions, he just does what his logic tells him to do, and the plot is moved forward, and Christopher is moved forward like a pawn, not like a full human being. Autistic characters are frequently written this way and it is disheartening to read another one.

There’s also something more subtle wrong with him. He’s written as if every stereotype the author ever heard of autism, is 100% correct, and as if every single autistic trait he’s ever heard of can be crammed together in one person, with no regard as to how they fit together. In real autistic people, autistic traits form a system. They are like an elegantly built construction set. Christopher is written in a way such that, if he were made of Lego, someone would have had to break a bunch of Lego pieces to get everything to fit together properly. Or like a Zometool construction where you can tell someone has been bending the struts so that in the end, the whole thing comes flying apart. There’s just something about the way his traits fit together that would not work in a real autistic person. It’s not the fact that he has extremes of ability and disability – that’s practically normal in an autistic person, and I am like that myself. But it’s the way everything fits together. It’s wrong. And lots of autistic people have commented on it being wrong, even though we can’t put our finger on exactly what it is. Other than that you can’t just take every autistic trait and stereotype you’ve ever heard of and cram them all together in a single person and expect them to work.

All that aside, there were parts of the book that I really enjoyed. I’m going to get vague here so I won’t spoil anything. There was a scene where he became extremely overloaded, and it was a good description of overload. I get overloaded visually every day, and it showed how everything leapt out to him without a filter and he went into shutdown. That was highly realistic. I also liked the way that the book showed he could do things that nobody expected him to be capable of doing. This, too, is highly realistic: When autistic people put our minds to it, often under extreme stress, we are sometimes capable of one-time feats of extreme ability, that we might not even be able to repeat later. And this happens to Christopher in the book, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it.

I have two stars rather than one star because I enjoyed the story somewhat the first time around. But unfortunately the portrayal of the character really brought it down for me. I don’t like reading about yet another autistic boy who Doesn’t Understand Emotions (Not Even His Own) and Thinks In Pure Logic and doesn’t actually make his own decisions or anything because his Pure Logic guides him every step of the way, so that he has no actual agency in the plot and is as much a cardboard cutout as anything else. And I’ve read way too many books and stories where autistic people are handled in the same way. It’s almost become its own stereotype by now. And it gets old.

Mind you, no character can represent all autistic people. No character should. But I’ve known hundreds of autistic people and while I’ve met people who could be mistaken for Christopher, I’ve never met a real Christopher. And that says something. I’d like to see a really wide variety of autistic people represented in fiction. I’d like to see us breaking out of the stereotypes. I’d like to see, instead of people doing their research by reading Simon Baron-Cohen (who sets up his experiments so he’ll get the results he wants), people doing their research by listening to actual autistic people, getting to know a wide variety of us so they can see how we really work. There are some that are far more like Christopher than I am, and I’m about as far from Christopher as you can get, although we have some things in common. But we all are far more realistic – because real things don’t have to be realistic, we’re *real* – than these depictions that make us sound like Walking Talking Autism instead of a well-rounded character. Everything about Christopher is autism, there’s no “him” there.