This is an aside titled 'The Rise of the Neuronovel' dated 10/19/09
Marco Roth writes about “The Rise of the Neuronovel” in n+1: “Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder.” He thinks it shows “shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are.” I think it’s because we don’t publish enough fuck ups. If modern writers won’t be mentally unstable themselves, then they must, at the very least, try to empathize with those of that condition.-
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