I was enticed to buy Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Nick Hornby's lukewarm review in The Believer (which I read anthologized in Hornby's excellent The Polysyllabic Spree) -- and after reading the book tonight I feel similarly lukewarm, though for somewhat different reasons. Hornby disliked the book because he felt it didn't paint a reliable picture of autism, which I tend to think he's right about (his son, incidentally, is highly autistic, which he talks a lot about in the review). He's right: this is nothing like the book an autistic person would write, in large part because the main character is all quirks and no autism. Reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time you never get the sense that you're experiencing a radically different state of mind from your own.

That bothered me.

But mostly it's just that the book didn't live up to the massive hype surrounding it. The preoccupations and strange obsessiveness of the voice is nice enough, but this type of thing has been done much better in any number of books. Motherless Brooklyn in particular springs to mind.

I really don't expect our descendents to be pouring over this novel in a hundred years, regardless of what Vintage Books may want you to think.

Still, it was an enjoyable read for a Wednesday evening.