Rare is the book that can wring more pathos out of its subject than one written by a parent about his or her disadvantaged child. In this slim, reflective memoir, the author of Sixpence House
takes readers from the moment he and his wife learn their three-year-old son Morgan is autistic through the long and often agonizing attempt to simply communicate with him. Morgan is advanced, having learned the alphabet at age one. It isn't much longer before he's reading medical texts and is a computer whiz. But he refuses to communicate verbally and barely acknowledges his parents' presence. A lover of arcana, Collins refers back to what may have been the first studied case of autism, concerning the Wild Child of Hamelin, a young boy found wandering the Black Forest in 1725, who acted more animal than human and was later a celebrated oddity at the British court, inspiring everyone from Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift. Collins spends inordinate amounts of time investigating the Wild Child, which may frustrate readers, since the way Collins delineates his attempts to break into Morgan's hermetic existence of math and music (two of the most common obsessions with autists and savants) is so fascinating. At one point, to stop Morgan from yelling, Collins simply gives him a bus schedule, which Morgan then intently studies, lost in his happy universe of numbers. This is a smart, compassionate study of autists—"the ultimate square pegs"—and how they see the world, darkly, through the thickets of their own genius. Agent, Michelle Tessler. (Apr.)
Forecast:
An author tour through the Pacific Northwest might generate interest, along with national media and an online promotion at
www.mcsweeneys.net
.
