Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes (1966)

REACTION: ★★★★ (Loved)

One man's intellectual journey and its psychological ramifications. This story manages to be both smart and moving at the same time. The sci-fi experiment of incrementally raising Charlie's I.Q. from idiot to genius lends a great premise for dissecting humanity and society. My favorite kind of magical realism. The journal format works well for this as it captures Charlie's change in I.Q. more concretely when you can see it reflected in the change in how he writes. My only nitpick is having direct quotes of dialogue and play by play behavior descriptions in a journal. Effective narrative yes, but really who journals like that? But whatever I'll suspend disbelief for the sake of the otherwise awesome storytelling. Though the feminist in me can't help but wonder whether this would be the same kind of story had Charlie been a woman rather than a man. Would that story even be written? Anyway, I like the unfolding of Charlie's past and his memories of it becoming clearer as he becomes better able to make meaning out of it. Like picking up scattered puzzle pieces that were always on the floor before and just now trying to fit them together. But what I love most about this story is Charlie's evolving perception of life and the people around him and what it's all about. Cool use of psychological assessments even if slightly outdated (but then this was the 1960s). The whole meeting-in-the-middle love story between Charlie and Alice kind of reminds me of the one between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" movie (which I watched before I started this book), but instead of age it's intelligence. Very bittersweet and entirely human despite the sci-fi element. 


QUOTES:

"If the operashun werks good Ill show that mouse I can be as smart as he is"  [Charlie, IQ=70]

"You're beginning to see what's behind the surface of things."  [Alice to Charlie]

"I’m not sure what I.Q. is anyway. Prof. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were—like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss…said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff. ...Burt Seldon…said that some people would say both of them were wrong and…the I.Q. measures a lot of different things including some of the things you learned already and it really isn’t a good measure of intelligence at all."  [Charlie, IQ=100]

"I had reached a new level, and anger and suspicion were my first reactions to the world around me."  [Charlie]

"Bernice, the pretty blonde with empty eyes, looked up and smiled dully."

"I realize now that my feeling for Alice had been moving backward against the current of my learning, from worship, to love, to fondness, to a feeling of gratitude and responsibility. My confused feeling for her had been holding me back... But with the freedom came a sadness. I wanted to be in love with her… Now it’s impossible. I am just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70. And this time we both know it."  [Charlie]

"I remember Him as a distant uncle with a long beard on a throne (like Santa Claus in the department store on his big chair, who picks you up on his knee and asks you if you’ve been good, and what would you like him to give you?)."  [Charlie, about the idea of God]

"He's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs."  [Burt to Charlie, about Prof. Nemur]

"You’re lopsided. You know things. You see things. But you haven’t developed understanding, or…tolerance. You call them phonies, but when did either of them ever claim to be perfect, or superhuman? They’re ordinary people. You’re the genius."  [Burt to Charlie]

"I’m exceptional—a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of 'gifted' and 'deprived' (which used to mean 'bright' and 'retarded') and as soon as 'exceptional' begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional."  [Charlie]