Not Even Wrong: A Review of Paul Collins' Book on Adventures with Autism

Paul Collins is not yet out of his 30s, but he has already established a reputation as a careful scholar of quirky people, arcane inventions and individuals who tried hard to succeed but who were eventually forgotten because of their bad timing, bad judgment or bad luck. And now it is as if the gods of tragedy, irony and blessing have made his life as complex as the people he studies by giving the gift of Morgan, his child with autism, to him and his wife Jennifer. In this 2004 book, written while Morgan was three years-old, Collins shows himself the master of arcana, an astute student of the short history of autism and its interpretation in our culture, and an alternatively confused and grateful father struggling to understand his son's autism. Yet, for all his literary flair and utterly-engaging historical tales, the book doesn't quite reach the levels of promise that match Collins' literary gifts and obvious intelligence. If we can say that Morgan is rather fully absorbed in his own world of autism, and Jennifer is the down-to-earth practical mother, it might be accurate to say that Paul is somewhere in between: tethered reluctantly to the realia of life today but seemingly wanting to escape into obscure worlds of other eras. He misses two big opportunities, which I will detail below, to take this book in a direction that would yield the very thing that he is trying to give the reader: insight into the world that people with autism inhabit and blessings or learnings they bring to us.

Meeting the Family

Paul, his painter-wife Jennifer, and three year-old son Morgan live in a comfortable old Victorian home on the East Side of Portland, OR. After denying the possiblity of his Morgan's autism, they face up to it through the gentle but insistent questions of their pediatrician. They are fortunate to get good professional advice and service, but we never learn if they have to pay for it all, how much they pay, or whether the services are paid for by insurance, the state or someone else. We see Morgan struggling, learning, wanting to explore (i.e., destroy) pianos and many other things, and we realize that raising a child with autism is a sort of full-time activity, one that takes the very best that any parent has to offer.

But this isn't simply a narrative of a family's "adventures" or "struggles" with autism. What Collins is interested in doing is weaving his historical work on arcane or forgotten subjects (such as the Wild Boy of Germany/England in the 18th century) with sympathetic, insightful and, in one instance, searing presentations/criticism of some early autism researchers (Bruno Bettelheim comes in for criticism) to give us a sort of symphony of images concerned with autism and its strange gift to humanity. But my difficulty in phrasing the last sentence is perhaps indicative of the difficulty with the book--that as we read we are not quite sure if there is a pattern to the weave, or if there is any kind of "quilt" that he is actually making. Some of the individual pictures he draws are compellingly drawn: the long narratives of the Wild Boy and his effect on a whole generation of significant English writers, the beautiful, intimate and very brief portrait of Stephen Jay Gould's learning from his son with autism, the fascinating story of Dr. Down, after whom the syndrome is named. In fact, as I think more and more about Collins' writing style, he actually puts in print what his wife probably does on the canvas: he draws us many little vignettes of different color, tone and description, but each of the stories or vignettes is really a "stand-alone" piece.

Missed Chances

I consider myself a lover of arcane things, and so I luxuriated in such things as his description of Victorian literary pleasures or the 19th century forerunners of today's scholars of synesthesia. But Collins seems to want to do more than just give us an "eyeful" or "mindful" of images in the book; he strives for more integration even if he doesn't actually provide it. Two examples will show this. First is the title for the book--Not Even Wrong. He tells us (pp. 85-86) that this phrase comes from the reaction of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who would say it when his questioners were so off-base in their questions that any answers he would give would be irrelevant. Hence the interlocutors were not even demonstrating understanding, much less incorrect understanding.

But since this is the title of the book, why didn't Collins run with it? That is, a whole section of the book, if not the book itself, could have been built on the notion that autism researchers, or parents, or the human quest to classify species of mental retardation is simply "not even wrong." His point then could have been an argument for humility, for cooperative rather than competitive effort, for patient searching for the building blocks of understanding about autism, or for showing us how our knowledge of this bewildering phenomenon has grown. But he doesn't go there...

Second, at one point he makes a seemingly significant observation:

"Autists are described by others — and by themselves — as aliens among humans. But there's an irony to this, for precisely the opposite is true. They are us, and to understand them is to begin to understand what it means to be human. Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. But autism is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an overexpression of the very traits that make our species unique. Other animals are social, but only humans are capable of abstract logic. The autistic outhuman the humans, and we can scarcely recognize the result."

This is a potentially brilliant observation, but one that needs a lot of follow up. What is "abundant" about Morgan's autism for you and for Jennifer, Paul? What might be the abundance that people with autism bring to our culture? How might autism transform the way we look at education? at government? at work? This is such a promising statement, but it quickly is lost as Collins rushes back to tell us more stories of arcane individuals who may or may not have suferered from something akin to autism.

Conclusion

This is a good read, a fluent read. It is as if Collins has taken us on a museum tour of curios in a not-often-visited wing of the British Museum. Sometimes we find our life on those wings, but often we just are amused or titillated or even confused. I am afraid that Not Even Wrong might be contribute a bit more to the latter than the former, even though it has given me many threads that I might want to investigate further...

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