Book - The Rosie Result

Post Reply New Topic

Once you pop the cork on a bottle of champagne, the bubbly effervescence lasts only so long. That's what seems to have happened with the somewhat flat final novel in Graeme Simsion's initially sparkling Rosie trilogy, about a geekily charming geneticist whose spot on the autism spectrum is evident to everyone but him.

The trilogy began with The Rosie Project (2013), a screwball comedy centered on Don Tillman's hilarious campaign to find a wife — a process in which he learned firsthand that unexpected emotions can unleash both mayhem and joy. The Rosie Effect (2014) found Don and Rosie ten months into marriage, living in New York and expecting a child. Simsion wraps up the series with The Rosie Result, which is largely focused on Don's latest campaign — to spare his brilliant but awkward 11-year-old son Hudson the unhappiness he experienced growing up.

Dedicated to "the many people in the autism community who have inspired and supported these books," the social objective of The Rosie Result is clear from the outset: to dispel all-too-common misconceptions and prejudices about what it means to be "on the spectrum" — a phrase that recognizes varying degrees of autism, but which is increasingly bandied about to characterize anyone who is less than optimally attuned to irony and social niceties. Simsion's goal is laudable, and this book thoughtfully addresses the advantages and disadvantages of formal diagnosis.

Part of the problem is that when Don's rational-to-a-fault approach to life isn't offset by Rosie, his sarcastic comic foil, he can sound about as engaging as a refrigerator manual. But Rosie's primary focus in this volume, alas, is on battling her sexist boss's attempts to marginalize her in what was supposed to be her new dream job.

Don, an "Einstein in overalls" whose default conversational response is "Correct," is still tightly programmed, with an idiosyncratic propensity for what he calls "time-sharing" — multi-tasking in pursuit of efficiency. (He learns the hard way that shucking oysters while doing squats is a recipe for disaster.) He tends to miss nuance, but his gaffes aren't as funny as I suspect Simsion wanted them to be.

Don's biggest misstep is what he refers to as the Genetics Lecture Outrage, a distressing consequence of his unfortunate, unorthodox response to a student's question about whether race has a genetic basis. (It involves lining up students by skin shade.) This leads to serious trouble, which Don might be able to mitigate by admitting to autism.

The Rosie Result addresses multiple forms of discrimination, including not just a tendency to label all but the "neurotypical" as weird, but gender prejudice as well. So for a variety of reasons, including marital equity, Don takes the lead in dealing with Hudson's problems adjusting to his new school after the family moves back to Australia for Rosie's job.

A roster of atypical characters, including Hudson's albino friend (named Blanche!), whose father is an anti-vaxxer with serious anger issues, infuses some fizz. When Don learns that "Rabbit" Warren, Hudson's insensitive teacher, called the boy a "grammar Nazi" — fueling classmates' taunts — his comment is priceless: "'No filter,' I said, without thinking."

It quickly becomes apparent that father and son are on parallel learning curves, and both may be able to dodge some sticky situations by agreeing to submit to testing for autism. Why resist, then? A woman at a seminar on autism sums up the issue: "In the end, it's your choice, your identity. Diagnosis is for diseases." In the end, The Rosie Result is about learning to be comfortable with who you ar

Graeme Simsion’s new book, “The Rosie Result,” is the final installment of a trilogy focused on Don Tillman, a man who Simsion has implied since the first book is autistic. The first novel in the series, “The Rosie Project,” won multiple international awards and was lauded by Bill Gates. It charted Don’s hapless forays into romantic relationships. In “The Rosie Result,” set more than a decade later, we find Don grappling with the challenges of fatherhood, with a son who may be on the spectrum — and facing the possibility that he may be on the spectrum himself.

I am an autistic adult. And to put it plainly, “The Rosie Result” is the worst new book I have read in the past three years.

I generally take pains to focus on the positives of any creative work. But the best I can say about this book is that with its reasonably large text, simple vocabulary and fewer than 400 pages, it’s an easy read, technically speaking

More seriously, I find Simsion’s portrayal of autism foolish at best, deeply offensive at worst.

The protagonist, Don, is cut from the same cloth as Hugh Dancy’s Adam in the eponymous film, Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory” and the protagonists of “The Good Doctor” and “Atypical.” All portray clueless, quirky white male geniuses to represent autism.

Don compulsively estimates the body mass index of each person he encounters. He harangues his friend Dave, who is obese, to go to the gym, warning Dave that if he doesn’t lose weight his wife will leave him. Later, Don gives his wife, Rosie, athletic shoes for their anniversary and tells her that she should spend more time in the gym. Somehow, Rosie finds this charming rather than insulting.

Simsion is no better at writing women than he is at writing autism. To his credit, there are multiple autistic women in “The Rosie Result.” Unfortunately, though, they are either villains or intolerably shrill. One character, Liz, for example, is a purple-haired lesbian activist, presumably meant to represent a member of the neurodiversity movement. She wears an “Autistic Lives Matter” T-shirt and makes divisive statements such as, “You’re either autistic or you’re neurotypical.”

In contrast, Simsion’s autistic men are mostly portrayed as good and pleasant, if somewhat misunderstood; Dov, Tazza the Geek, Merlin, and Don’s son Hudson are all inoffensively nerdy young white men.

The Rosie Result” botches issues of race too. Within the first 20 pages of the book, Don decides to give his class a lesson on race and genetics by using the words “negroid” and “mongoloid” and having his students line up in order from lightest to darkest skin. The faculty encourages Don to chalk this behavior up to his autism, and Simsion clearly wants his reader to see it as an unfortunate misunderstanding on Don’s part. The message is cringe-worthy.

Later in the novel, we realize that the incident was a setup for one of Don’s students, a white woman, to aggrandize herself by humiliating him. Because the neurotypical women in “The Rosie Result” are unpleasant shrews, too.

As the inscription, a quote from Albert Camus, says: “We are all special cases.” Personally, I would like portrayals of autism in fiction to be considerably less special. I want portrayals of autistic people who are neither exceptionally gifted savants nor human maelstroms who destroy their families’ lives. I want to read about autistic characters who are as nuanced and complex as all people are. “The Rosie Result” does not deliver.