Free Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby Page A

of my writing. Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish—an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables—I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, “This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.” That never happens.)
    Anyway, I finally succumbed to Mark Haddon’s book, simply because it had been recommended to me so many times as a piece of fiction, rather than as a recognizable portrait of my home life. It’s the third book about autism I’ve read in three months, and each book—this one, Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam , and Paul Collins’s Not Even Wrong —contains a description of the classic test devised to demonstrate the lack of a theory of mind in autistic children. I’ll quote Paul Collins’s succinct summary:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Sally and Anne have a box and a basket in front of them. Sally puts a marble in the basket. Then she leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in the box. When Sally comes back in, where will she look for her marble?
    If you ask ordinary kids, even ordinary three-year-olds, to observe Sally and Anne and then answer the question, they’ll tell you that Sally will look in the basket. An autistic kid, however, will always tell you that Sally should look in the box, because an autistic kid is unable to imagine that someone else knows (or feels, or thinks) anything different from himself. In The Curious Incident , Christopher attempts to solve a murder-mystery, and one would imagine that of all the career-paths closed off to autists, the path leading to a desk at the FBI is probably the least accessible. If you are profoundly unable to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, then a job involving intuition and empathy, second-guessing and psychology is probably not the job for you. Haddon has Christopher, his narrator, refer to the theory-of-mind experiment, and it’s the one moment in the book where the author nearly brings his otherwise smartly imagined world crashing about his and our ears. Christopher talks about his own failure in the test, and then says, “That was because when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. Because I decided it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.”
    â€œ I decided it was a kind of puzzle… ” Hold on a moment: that means—what?—that every Asperger’s kid could do this, if they so chose? That the most debilitating part of the condition—effectively, the condition itself—could be removed by an application of will? This is dangerous territory, and I’m not sure Haddon crosses it with absolute conviction. The Curious Incident… is an absorbing, entertaining, moving book, but when truth gets bent out of shape in this way in order to serve the purposes of a narrative, then maybe it’s a book that can’t properly be described as a work of art? I don’t know. I’m just asking the question. Happily, the detective element of the novel has been pretty much forgotten by the second half, and one description—of Christopher trying and failing to get