The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

 

I read this in a coffeeshop this morning. I was not entirely overwhelmed by it, but it was not horrible or anything. Things of note that caught my attention: Interesting for an instructor in creative writing to persist in dropping backhanded mockery of "proper novels"; Haddon did a reasonable job of humanizing his protagonist--Chris isn't much less of a hypocrite than many of the neurotypical folks he encounters, his insistence that he doesn't lie notwithstanding--but he still mostly failed to write a narrator I found particularly engaging. Somewhere around the midpoint of this short novel, the story became simultaneously more obvious and less interesting, probably when it stopped even putting on airs of being a mystery. No regrets, here, just a novel that didn't do much for me.