When I finished writing my novel The Birdcatcher, I was puzzled by something. Though I was convinced that it was a good book, I couldn’t find anything quotable in it.
Then one of my readers set me straight. In an email, she told me how as she was reading the book she continually had to stop and call out to her husband, “Listen to this!”, then she would read another passage to him.
Suddenly I realized that I was reading as the author, not as a reader. I tried out a reader’s perspective and I was astonished at how much I found.
For example, here is Chris Stone remembering an event in Vietnam, when he was sitting in a group at night, where they were discussing the death of one of the platoon in an ambush earlier that day. Chris was trying to show some solidarity with them:
There was a specialist four in that unit who didn’t like me. He was one of those men who could talk easily, who could keep a conversation going as long as you liked, even when there was nothing left to say. He was doing most of the talking. I wasn’t listening to him until, at one point, I realized that he was talking about me.
“Look at him,” he said to the others. “He just sits there watching, taking it all in, analyzing everything. Jimmy didn’t mean anything to him. The war doesn’t mean anything to him. He doesn’t care who gets killed, whether it’s the gooks or us.”
There was in his voice, and his words, all the callousness, insensitivity, hostility and rejection I’d known since I could remember.
He stopped and he and I stared at one another. Two men who despised one other, both knowing how easy murder was in the midst of combat, how simple it was to conceal, and how frequently it happened over there.
Chris then remembers how he simply got up without speaking and walked off into the dark. Then he reflects on his alienation from other men:
Are there any people more misunderstood than those who are solitary? When we have nothing to say, people think we’re indifferent. If we don’t react to verbal abuse, they think we’re timid. If we don’t brag or boast, or do anything to promote ourselves, they think we have no confidence. If we show no emotion, they assume we have none.
If you read the whole book, you’ll see that Stone is on his way here to his discovery of the core ideas in autism, and how they help explain loners like him
In future posts I’m going to show you more of what Christopher Stone has to say in that book.
Alan Conrad 