this sort of prejudice. English scouts visiting my Friday morning five-a-side game have (presumably) discounted me on peripheral grounds of age, weight, speed, amount of time spent lying on the ground weeping with exhaustion, etc.; what they’re not looking at is performance, which is of course the only thing that counts. They’d have made a film called Head It Like Hornby by now if Billy Beane were working over here. (And if I were any good at heading, another overrated and peripheral skill.) Anyway, I understood about one word in every four of Moneyball, and it’s still the best and most engrossing sports book I’ve read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode.
I have an autistic son, but I don’t often read any books about autism. Most of the time, publishers seem to want to hear from or about autists with special talents, as in Rain Man (my son, like the vast majority of autistic kids, and contrary to public perception, has no special talent, unless you count his remarkable ability to hear the opening of a crisp packet from several streets away), or from parents who believe that they have “rescued” or “cured” their autistic child, and there is no cure for autism, although there are a few weird stories, none of which seem applicable to my son’s condition. So most books on the subject tend to make me feel alienated, resentful, cynical, or simply baffled. Granted, pretty much any book on any subject seems to make me feel this way, but I reckon that in this case, my personal experience of the subject means I’m entitled to feel anything I want.
I read Charlotte Moore’s book because I agreed to write an introduction for it, and I agreed to write an introduction because, in a series of brilliant columns in the Guardian, she has managed not only to tell it like it is, but to do so with enormous good humour and wit—George and Sam (Moore has three sons, two of whom are autistic) is, believe it or not, the funniest book I’ve read this year. I’m not sure I would have found it as funny six or seven years ago, when Danny was first diagnosed, and autism wasn’t a topic that made me laugh much; but now that I’m used to glancing out of the window on cold wet November nights and suddenly seeing a ten-year-old boy bouncing naked and gleeful on a trampoline, I have come to relish the stories all parents of autistic kids have.
The old cliché “You couldn’t make it up” is always dispiriting to anyone who writes fiction—if you couldn’t make it up, then it’s probably not worth talking or writing about anyway. But autism is worth writing about—not just because it affects an increasingly large number of people, but because of the light the condition shines down on the rest of us. And though you can predict that autistic kids are likely to behave in peculiar obsessive-compulsive ways, the details of these compulsions and obsessions are always completely unimaginable, and frequently charming in their strangeness. Sam, the younger of Moore’s two autistic boys, has an obsession with oasthouses—he once escaped from home in order to explore a particularly fine example a mile and a half away. “Its owner, taking an afternoon nap, was startled to be joined in bed by a small boy still wearing his Wellington boots.”
George, meanwhile, is compelled to convince everyone that he doesn’t eat, even though he does. After his mum has made his breakfast she has to reassure him that it’s for Sam, and then turn her back until he’s eaten it. (Food has to be smuggled into school, hidden inside his swimming things.) Sam loves white goods, especially washing machines, so during a two-week stay in London he was taken to a different launderette each day, and nearly combusted with excitement; he also likes to look at bottles of lavatory cleaner through frosted glass. George parrots lines he’s learned from videotapes: “The Government has let me down,” he told his trampoline teacher recently. (For some reason, trampolines are a big part of our lives.) “This would make Ken Russell spit with envy,” he remarked enigmatically on another occasion. Oasthouses, washing machines, pretending not to eat when really you do… see? You really couldn’t make it up.
I don’t want to give the impression that living with an autistic child is all fun. If you have a child of the common or garden-variety, I wouldn’t recommend, on balance, that you swap him in (most autistic kids are boys) for a child with a hilarious obsession. Hopefully I need hardly add that there’s some stuff that… well, that, to understate the case, isn’t quite as hilarious. I am merely pointing out, as Moore is doing, that if you are remotely interested in the strangeness and variety and beauty of humankind, then there is a lot in the condition to marvel at. This is the first book about autism I’ve read that I’d recommend to people who want to know what it is like; it’s sensible about education, diet, possible causes, just about everything that affects the quotidian lives of those dealing with the condition. It also made this parent feel better about the compromises one has to make: “This morning George breakfasted on six After Eights [After Eights are “sophisticated” chocolate mints] and some lemon barley-water. I was pleased—pleased—because lately he hasn’t been eating at all…” In our house it’s salt-and-vinegar crisps.
I can imagine George and Sam doing a roaring trade with grandparents, aunts, and uncles tough enough to want to know the truth. I read it while listening to Damien Rice’s beautiful O for the first time, and I had an unexpectedly transcendent moment: the book coloured the music, and the music coloured the book, and I ended up feeling unambivalently happy that my son is who he is; those moments are precious. I hope George and Sam finds a U.S. publisher.
A couple of months ago, I became depressed by the realization that I’d forgotten pretty much everything I’ve ever read. I have, however, bounced back: I am now cheered by the realization that, if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever read, then I can read some of my favorite books again as if for the first time. I remembered the punch line of The Sirens of Titan, but everything else was as fresh as a daisy, and Vonnegut’s wise, lovely, world-weary novel was a perfect way to cap Charlotte Moore’s book: she’d prepared the way beautifully for a cosmic and absurdly reductive view of our planet. I’m beginning to see that our appetite for books is the same as our appetite for food, that our brain tells us when we need the literary equivalent of salads, or chocolate, or meat and potatoes. When I read Moneyball, it was because I wanted something quick and light after the 32-oz steak of No Name; The Sirens of Titan wasn’t a reaction against George and Sam, but a way of enhancing it. So what’s that? Mustard? MSG? A brandy? It went down a treat, anyway.
Smoking is rubbish, most of the time. But if I’d never smoked, I’d never have met Kurt Vonnegut. We were both at a huge party in New York, and I sneaked out onto the balcony for a cigarette, and there he was, smoking. So we talked—about C. S. Forester, I seem to remember. (That’s just a crappy and phony figure of speech. Of course I remember.) So tell your kids not to smoke, but it’s only fair to warn them of the down side, too: that they will therefore never get the chance to offer the greatest living writer in America a light.
BOOKS BOUGHT: