The Curious Habit of Running Away

Just finished reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" by Mark Haddon. It was amazing, just as if someone massaged my brain. I delighted in following the paths logically marked out by the narrator, a teenager with the Asperger Syndrome, who carefully draws plans, graphs and formulas for each of his actions and ideas. He sticks to his order, keeps on explaining the world to himself and tries to catch up with the course of events. One of his rules, for instance, is a refusal to eat anything either brown or yellow and it's a principle he repeats through the whole book, like a mantra, until it becomes some general truth, obvious also for the reader. It's similar with his deep dislike of people who touch him, joke while talking to him or use metaphors too often. These rules are like firm pillars that made me feel safe throughout the book.
"The Curious Incident..." was meant to be a book either for teenagers and for adults. Haddon created an "enclosed world", as Jeanette Winterson would probably call it, which made the younger part of me cheerfully hide inside the narration, closing the door behind. Haddon's commentary on the book helped me realized the "adult" part of the novel. He says the book that kept on emerging in his thoughts while he wrote "The Curious Incident..." was "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. Haddon notices that lives of Austen's protagonists were limited to a very narrow space with no chances for a turning point or some grate change in fate. But Austen (who, according to Hadden, if she lived nowadays, would probably write about some chartered accountants), when she told the stories of women, whose only exciting moment in life was marriage, went deep inside their world and showed it as a fascinating one. And she did it in such a form, Haddon continues, that would be interesting for the protagonists themselves: in the form of a romance.
The same trick is introduced in "The Curious Incident...", which has the traits of a detective story – the favorite genre of Christopher, the main character and narrator. And the motif of life's painful boredom is included in the stories of the supporting characters, who are tired of running away into another relationship, another city, just any other place. They discover that their escapes invariably turn out to be nothing more but jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Following Austen's train of thoughts, Haddon says that it's the space given to us where we ought to find the conditions that would be most optimal for us; that the alleged destination of our escape is an illusion that never meets its fulfillment. "It's about accepting that every life is narrow and that our only escape from this is not to run away (to another country, another relationship, a slimmer, more confident self) but to learn to love the people we are and world in which we find ourselves." This leitmotif is conveyed by Christopher himself: "People go on holidays to see new things… but I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly."
Fortunately, I'm so impressed by the inner structure of the book and its form, a perfect reflection of how the "Aspie's" brain works, and I took such a liking to the balanced mixture of sadness and great charm, that it's almost possible for me to swallow this bitter lesson on the affirmation of life.
In his text written for The Observer, Mark Haddon introduced a significant division between the "genre fiction" and "literary fiction", the first of which offers an escape to a pretty cowardly reader, letting them be whatever they want to, but on a completely imaginary plain. The "literary fiction", on the contrary, makes the reader admit to who they are but in the same time it provokes them into going to the deeper layers of it and discovering the resources of possibilities that are included in the pack. It seems that the "genre fiction" can be linked with the "enclosed worlds" Jeanette Winterson mentioned, and the "literary fiction" with the kind of fiction she encouraged us to introduce into our life in order to stretch its sizes, move its limits; to create within our own reality. (Funny that both of them refer to Jane Austen.)
What's incredible in Hadden's book to me is how he managed to join these two plains. There's no equality of rights between them, however; the whole work was meant to be lined with the literary fiction and the mere aftertaste of a fine writing tells me to make my way towards this plain. But there's also the dimension attractive for a cowardly or juvenile fugitive, this subtle element that lets the reader hide safe inside the neurotic inclinations of Christopher, inside his mathematical, logical formula, to which he tries to reduce his whole reality. Besides, the mere fact the book reads practically at one gulp reveals its genre kinship with the Harry Potter's clan.
Mark Haddon is right when he says that there are very few writers that manage to reach this kind of consensus. According to him, there are only two novels that "have a foot in both camps": it's "Jane Eyre" and "The Woman in White". "The Curious Incident..." is surely the third one.
And one last thing: the awareness that you have written a book like that must be incredible. I imagine it's something of a great relief that you managed to pick something intangible out of the air and in the same time, to safe your life. Or maybe I can't imagine it at all.