There was a bit of a fuss last year because Moon said some stupid things about immigrants and Islam, but I read books by all sorts of writers. I think the values expressed in the book itself are warm and liberal.
dalmeny's husband spoke to me at the party on Sunday about Moon; he told me that she has an autistic child. I do not know many severely autistic people, so it is hard for me to judge, but it seems to be a sympathetic but realistic portrayal of the internal life of an autistic person. I think the most striking thing about the book, for me, is the choice to dwell deeply in the minutiae of humble domestic experience. Lou's attention is tightly focused on sensory details of his immediate environment, and he does not get bored by physical repetition. For example, Lou does his laundry in laborious detail several times through the book, and this is handled with a very similar affect to more conventionally 'dramatic' incident. Not only is this respectful of the autistic person's experience, I think it is also an endorsement of the domestic - a big part of every woman's existence - as a legitimate focus for artistic expression. Actually, I think this may be the most radical aspect of the book. The gentle dwelling-in everyday experience.
Another aspect of the book which I liked is the warmth and humour with which Lou's experiences are portrayed. So, it is clear that some of the people he meets are being extremely kind to him, and some are utter shits, and he doesn't always get the full implications of the things they say and do. But we as readers see through his descriptions, so there is an ironic additional layer to our understanding. It is delicately done, so that we are not laughing at Lou, but laughing at the extra layer we often see behind his dry description of his interactions with others. And sometimes this moved me to tears. One also gets the impression that Lou is a generous and likable man.
The voice work is another aspect of this. The story is read by an American actor with a particularly deep and resonant voice. When portraying the voices of autistic people, he did not shirk from 'acting' the characteristic constriction, reduced inflection, slight flatness (or do I mean thinness) of their voices, but in no way losing your commitment to these characters as the centre of the story, the most important people. I think if they had been voiced like neurotypical people that would have demeaned them. As if we could only care for them if they presented 'like us'.
I would be interested in the opinions of autistic people, or parents and friends of autistic people, on whether they felt this balance between honest portrayal of neural damage, and respect for the person affected, was done successfully. I feel it was.
The final aspect of this novel that interested me is that another and very different book - Vernor Vinge's space opera A Deepness in the Sky - dwells behind this one, without being named. The book is mentioned at one point, but the speaker (an autistic man) can't remember its title, and thinks it might have been a scientific paper he read. Deepness is about a hyper-capitalist society which deliberately induces autistic-type damage in workers, to make them concentrate on their jobs. The relation between curing autistic workers to make them more productive, and inducing autism for capitalist exploitation, comes and goes under the surface of the story.
So, there is an additional ironic layer - yes, we as neurotypical see things that Lou does not - but secondly, we as SF fans see something that the mundane reader does not, something darker than the overt content of the novel.