"American Normal" by Lawrence Osborne

Osborne goes on to describe the treatments applied to Nicky (they included eliminating sugar, wheat and cow's milk from his diet, as well as administering Prozac and Valium) and the tips Nicky's mother had for dealing with similar "problem" children (such as "Initiate functioning interaction" and "Develop self-monitoring and self-management skills, create predictability").

Without being wholly unsympathetic to parents at the end of their rope -- how, exactly, does one deal with a child whose chief desire is to be a screwdriver? -- Osborne wonders aloud at the language used by most of the conference attendees. "It appeared essentially to be a corporate lingo whose vocabulary was relentlessly technical ... The child is seen simply as a machine which has gone wrong."

In a compact, funny and sharply written passage, Osborne describes the way he escaped, at the age of 9, from his own birthday party, a carefully planned event ("complete with a professional clown and fire-eater") that he had been dreading. (The actual escape was a feat of derring-do involving two sheets tied together, which he used to lower himself from his bedroom window.) And as a youngster growing up in England, Osborne was obsessed with the lute, which he considered deeply odd; its oddness in turn seemed sexy to him. As much as he loved this difficult-to-play instrument, its idiosyncrasies got the better of him one day, and he dashed his beloved lute to pieces on the road outside his family's home. (A passerby rang the doorbell and said to Osborne's mother, "I've found some pieces of lute in the road, madam. Are they yours?")

While Osborne doesn't claim to have Asperger's, he does wonder if these and other childhood (as well as adult) obsessions don't themselves seem a little Aspergerish. He also wonders if diagnoses of Asperger's and other syndromes or disorders aren't sometimes misapplied: "As the whole notion of individual eccentricity declines in Western culture, we come to rely more and more on the notion of medical disorder, and an array of syndromes that can be applied to all who are strange, or simply solitary."

Without diminishing the difficulties that people with Asperger's face -- the time he spends with such people makes their troubles, sometimes bordering on anguish, quite clear -- he does strive to show how, in some ways, they're not so different from "neurotypicals," or NTs, like you and me. And then, of course, there are the ways in which their differences are a kind of superiority. Osborne isn't out to romanticize Asperger's Syndrome, but he is open to the ways in which Asperger people see the world differently. He describes, for example, the way they sometimes express their thoughts in surrealist metaphors that make absolute sense. For example, "My sleep today was long but thin," or "I don't like the blinding sun, nor the dark, but best I like the mottled dark."

Osborne also spends some time chatting with some Asperger adults at a meeting, who mournfully admit that it's very difficult for them to find girlfriends (some 80 percent of people with Asperger's are boys or men). But they're blazingly intelligent and, Osborne finds, charming in a very specific way. One of them speaks of his desire to move once and for all to Hawaii. (He connects, Osborne explains, with Hawaii's "volcanic dramas, prehistoric greenness and sense of oceanic isolation.") "The mainland," the young man says with a sigh. "It's so NT."

Osborne's book is a fabulous example of the rather old-fashioned -- and, sadly, largely outmoded -- notion of allowing a curious, intelligent writer loose on a subject that interests him, even though he or she might not be a "known expert" or "specialist" in the field. What Osborne does have on his side is considerable: research, passion, clarity of thought, the ability to impart information in a way that's readable and entertaining. There are probably some persnickety scientific types out there who will object to the fact that a mere journalist -- in their eyes, a regular Joe -- has dared to write a book like "American Normal." Shouldn't such a book be written by a professional with years of experience in the field? Maybe. But then, that way of thinking is so NT.

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