Autism, in history and in the family

Paul Collins is clearly intrigued by eccentric people whose lives don’t quite meet expectations, and by ambitious adventures that don’t quite work out as planned. In his first book, “Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World,” Collins offered illuminating portraits of figures who nearly attained success in the arts, sciences and other fields but who instead fell into obscurity, madness or plain bad luck.

In his second book, “Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books,” Collins described a quixotic pilgrimage undertaken with his wife and infant son, when Collins uprooted the family from San Francisco to move to a small Welsh village famously overrun with antiquarian bookstores and oddball locals. (The expatriate fervor proved temporary, however, and the family moved back to the United States.)

As Collins’ previous books did, “Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism” mingles quirky historical anecdotes with personal observations and stories (not unlike the engaging work of Alain de Botton). This time, however, the author’s musings reveal a painful and frustrating struggle, after his son Morgan is diagnosed with autism. What Collins seeks is not pity but a better understanding of what it is like to live as an outsider.

By the age of 2, Morgan can do basic arithmetic, recall songs he’s heard and easily read words and sentences. (At age 1, he had learned the alphabet.) But Morgan doesn’t make eye contact or respond to commands, and he becomes agitated when others try to interact with him. When Collins and his wife, Jennifer, learn that Morgan has severe cognitive disabilities during a routine doctor visit, they go into denial. “How can it be that we left our house an hour ago with a healthy toddler,” writes Collins, “and returned with a disabled one?”

The book takes its title from Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who used to ridicule dissenting colleagues by saying they were “not even wrong,” meaning they were so far from any kind of truth that their points were irrelevant. Collins writes that Pauli’s idea could apply to the context of autistic people: “They do not respond in expected ways to questions or to social cues ... but then, only a person working from the same shared set of expectations could give a truly wrong answer. The autist is working on a different problem with a different set of parameters; they are not even wrong.” The discovery of Morgan’s autism leads Collins to delve back into his files on Peter the Wild Boy, as he was known -- a feral, nearly mute child found naked in the German countryside in 1725 and eventually given an adoptive home; there are differing accounts as to how and where he was first seen. Collins has amassed “snowdrifts” of notes and book drafts on Peter, a subject he has been unable to forget.

Reports of the wild child indicate that although Peter appeared mute, he could make sounds, “but nothing resembling human speech”: “He seemed deaf and yet was not quite that, either; for while neither the calling of his name nor the blast of a firearm produced so much as a flinch in the boy, the cracking of a walnut several rooms away could bring him running in eager anticipation. Indeed, as shy as he was, he seemed fairly happy with himself and friendly enough whenever he did take notice of the people around him.”

Collins alternates the story of his own 3-year-old son with various other figures throughout history that lived in their own private worlds. But he focuses on Peter, who in his lifetime became a celebrity of sorts. In 1785, Peter was buried in a village outside London. Collins pays a visit to the grave and then makes a research stop at the British Library, where he stumbles upon a revelation. “[L]ong before going to the doctor, before the batteries of tests on Morgan, before the diagnosis, before we ever imagined anything -- I had been chasing a silent boy through the even greater silence of centuries, when my own boy was in front of me all along.” Suddenly the connection crystallized: Peter the Wild Boy was an early case of autism, before it had a name.

Collins explores other notable autists throughout history, as well as early diagnoses (and misdiagnoses) and misconceptions about autism. Yet the most fascinating moments in “Not Even Wrong” occur as Collins tries to engage with Morgan. In one scene, he describes beckoning to Morgan as his son ignores him, yelling a phrase from a Beatles song instead. “Everything is a phrase from somewhere,” Collins writes, “from TV, from computer games, from books, from songs. He collects broken bits of language like a magpie, gathering stray threads of conversation; and he arranges them into a nest, comfortable to him and bafflingly strange to anyone else.”

As frustrating as their interactions sometimes are, Collins is admiring of his son’s unique abilities. “There is something endearing in such minds,” Collins writes. (He expresses a particular fondness for an 18th century mathematician who invented a ball-and-cup game that he played obsessively -- until the ball was caught 666,666 times.)

In working to understand his son’s world, partly by revisiting his own family history, Collins also elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be “normal” and what it means to be human.