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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Haddon, Mark Your Price: $12.00 (New - Trade Paper)

Sometimes, a book is great because of what it does to us — taking us to another place, teaching us something we did not know. Sometimes, a book is great because of what it does for us — providing us with a respite from a crazy world or giving us the language to explain what is otherwise inexplicable. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time was my most memorable reading experience of the last decade because it did all of that, and in particular because it articulated for me, and for those who care about me and my son, what is beautiful and maddening about the Asperger's Syndrome that in many ways defines him and our family.

In an act of startling technical mastery, Haddon accurately and poignantly renders the thought processes and voice of a young man who has both ample intellectual gifts and a form of autism, Asperger's Syndrome, that makes "normal" social interaction a chore, if not an impossibility. Haddon allows the reader to care deeply for this character and respect his unique gifts, without descending into a mawkish kind of pity for his limitations.

The novel also truthfully illustrates the significant pressures that the child's parents face in trying to rise to his intellectual mark and also manage the emotional demands that his social-skill deficiencies place on him and those around him. We know this is a great book because we alternately empathize with nearly every character in it, even as we root particularly for the protagonist to succeed both on his quest to solve the mystery that initially preoccupies him, and to understand the deeper mysteries that are at the root of his family's dissolution.

What made this book especially memorable for me, though, was not just that it was a great literary feat (it certainly was that), but that it gave me a compelling and effective way of explaining my son, and the intermittent craziness of our household, to those who love us. I found myself passing this book around to nearly everyone I knew and saying, "Here, read this. It's not just a great book, but a means of understanding what we are experiencing." To a person, those who finished the book thanked me for both a great read and for the keener perspective it gave them on a situation that they had admittedly misunderstood.

"Now I get it," they would say. And I believe that they do.

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