In the 2 weeks or so since I read this, after a bit of cogitation on whether or not I liked it and whether I had anything to say about it, I’ve decided that yes, I did, and yes, I do.
The story centres around Jacob, a young man with Apsegrers/autism and an obsessive interest in crime scene investigation and forensics. When his support worker disappears and is later found dead, Jacob is accused. We don’t discover exactly what happened until near the end, so there’s an element of a murder mystery to this novel, but the reader can make a good guess at how things might have gone down. The strength of this novel is not in the murder mystery itself, but how the accusations against Jacob play out on a personal level to the characters.
Certainly the author is a good writer, I was impressed by her ability to tell the story through the first-person viewpoint of several characters. Emma was particularly nuanced, perhaps being closer to the author herself, but Jacob and Theo were well done, too.
It struck me that the author was brave to portray an autistic character in a first-person point of view. There are some with a “them and us” mentality, viewing Autism as a minority subculture, who would take offense at a neurotypical attempting to write an autistic voice. I say, good on her for giving it a shot. Autistic people are, first and foremost, people.
And this is, primarily, a novel about Aspergers/autism. The author has obviously done a huge amount of research and the novel is heavy in AS details (which I can forgive, as the condition is nothing if not complex), and this is the driver of the plot, too. In essence it revolves around the way an autistic person’s view of himself can drastically differ from how he is viewed by his family, by outsiders, and by the legal system. It’s about the difficulty of finding out the truth and obtaining justice when dealing with someone with a literal mind, communication difficulties, and a condition so many associate with a lack of empathy. In that sense, this is an important novel.
While I applaud the author for tackling this subject, there were aspects with which I was uncomfortable.
Firstly, I was not convinced about the way Jacob’s autism presented. Even knowing the wide variety of trait severity out there, and knowing that some with a sky-high IQ can still struggle significantly in daily life, the dichotomy between trait severity and IQ in Jacob seemed too extreme. There’s a reason why classic autism and Aspergers Syndrome were once separate diagnoses, and I believe that intellectual capacity generally does help to moderate behaviour. So while I agree with the author that a child diagnosed with classic autism might potentially become an adult with Aspergers Syndrome, in Jacob she seems to have mixed the two, presenting a young man of great intellect who retains an absolute rigidity over things like food colours, and still has the uncontrolled screaming kind of meltdown.
Since Jacob’s meltdowns and his intellectual abilities are both necessary parts of the plot, my doubts detracted from the realism of the story and induced an element of disbelief in the legal proceedings which might otherwise have felt more dramatic.
I was also a little uncomfortable with the way in which Emma tackles her son’s autism, by placing him on a gluten and casein free diet and feeding him some very expensive supplements. Multivitamins and fish oils I can understand, but he also gets liposome-enclosed glutathione, an oxytocin nasal spray and daily injections of vitamin B12.
This is certainly consistent with Emma’s character – the mother who will do whatever it takes to improve Jacob’s life and relieve the family of his worst behaviours. I get that. What I’m uncomfortable with is that the benefits of these treatments are presented in the novel unchallenged. She tells us that the nasal spray and the B12 shot help with his anxiety, and average reader (who hasn’t studied the scientific literature and does not know that there is in fact no scientific consensus that such treatments have any benefit whatsoever) is likely to take this as gospel truth.
On reflection, despite these niggles, I’ve decided that I like what the author is doing here, overall. And it was certainly a very readable story, keeping me entertained for a couple of days. Recommended.
The Wandering Mind 