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RUBBERNECKER
by Belinda Bauer
Atlantic Monthly Press, August 2015
320 pages
$24.00
ISBN: 0802123961


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The title of Belinda Bauer's standalone is a word that I most commonly associate with hardboiled American slang of the 1930s, but it is apparently still sufficiently current to serve to describe the young protagonist of the novel, Patrick Fort, who has Asperger's syndrome. But it is not ghoulishness that inspires his curiosity. Patrick is interested in death, or, to be more precise, in the "how" of death. How can one be living at one moment and dead the next? Once dead, is one somewhere else or permanently gone? Patrick's father was killed in a hit and run when the eight-year-old Patrick who was walking with him barely escaped the car that did it. To the degree that Patrick is capable of loving anyone, he loved his dad and thereafter, his death is the major puzzle of Patrick's life.

The selection of a character with high-functioning Asperger's as detective is not unusual. Indeed, one of the most venerable is Sherlock Holmes himself, though of course Conan Doyle invented him twenty years before Hans Asperger was even born. A more recent, and a more touching, example is Christopher Boone of Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT....

Haddon allowed Christopher to tell his own story in the first person but Patrick's tale unfolds in third person narration, which was probably a technical decision, but one that has unfortunate consequences on the reader's response to the character. Patrick is, to put it mildly, difficult. He is excessively literal-minded. When he grasps a fact he does not let go of it lightly if at all. He is apparently incapable of feeling and is impatient with the kind of social oil that eases informal interactions among people, largely because he simply does not understand why they might be necessary. He is eighteen when we get to know him and has enrolled in the anatomy course at Cardiff, where he has been admitted to fulfill a quota of handicapped students. He is there not to become an anatomist, but to learn about death from the dead and so we follow him through his dissection lab where he is efficiently dismantling a cadaver in the company of three medical students. The gap between the students' unease, their nervous jokes, and their occasional moments of compassion and Patrick's single-minded pursuit of the task at hand is meant to reveal much about his mental condition.

Belinda Bauer ups the ante by providing another narrator with serious limitations, a man suffering from locked-in syndrome who lies in the coma ward of a Cardiff hospital. He is gradually emerging from a years-long state of unconsciousness and is able to observe, if not communicate, what he observes in the ward around him. His gradual change in state will unfortunately make him vulnerable to a mortal threat.

There's more. What was most moving about Christopher Boone's story was the degree to which Haddon was able to convey with sympathy Christopher's mother's desperation, never allowing us to judge her as failed. No such luck for Patrick's mum, who dives into a vodka bottle and stays there until Patrick is safely out of the house.

And then there's the sexy nurse, indifferent to her charges, with eyes only for the husband of a comatose woman.

In the end, it all comes together in what must be the neatest, most clinical resolution of plot in recent literary history. But clinical is the word. Each character is disposed of, for good or ill, each plot line resolved and in the end the reader is left with just about the same degree of emotional response as Patrick displays as he scalpels into his cadaver.

The book jacket carries a blurb that claims this one is "as good as Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME...and...it deserves to do equally well." It isn't. How it will do is hard to say, but readers who like to invest a bit of emotion in character might feel somewhat like rubberneckers themselves when they turn the final page of this.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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