The Curious Incident of the Rich Man Used to Being Pleased
Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the protagonist of which suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, claims that he constructed the novel in imitation of Jane Austen:
It has been suggested that his models for the novel were “Catcher in the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The three have some common ground as books about young outsiders, but, he said, the novel he had in mind when writing was actually “Pride and Prejudice.”
“Jane Austen writes about people with desperately restricted lives and codified by iron rules,” he said. “The first thing she does is to choose a genre, the romantic novel, which is exactly the kind of book those women would read if they were reading books. It clicked: that’s what I had to do with Christopher. I had read too many books and seen too many films where a person with a disability was seen from the outside. If I was going to treat him with complete empathy, I had to hand him the reins, make him tell the story, but make it the book he would read.”
