Flowers for Algernon, the Nebula award winning 1959 sci-fi novel by Daniel Keyes is a crowd favorite for the last half century. There were several reasons I should not have tried reading it, starting from my inability to read fiction as years progress being the main one. It did not help that the book belonged to category of 'scientific fiction' and was not written by a couple of SF writers that I could understand, namely Douglas Adams or Philip K. Dick. Nevertheless none of these stopped me from attempting to read this book, as the whole internet is ga-ga about Flowers for Algernon, I caught a case of FOMO.
While The Alchemist has a global following like soccer, Flowers for Algernon is very American like 'American football' (the one that uses hands to play.) Keyes went as far back as Mark Twain to adopt Huckleberry Finn's lingo, which had made reading Huckleberry Finn a torture for a non-native English speaker like me, who had to read aloud the mis-spelled words to understand what Huck Finn was saying. It is the same with Charlie, the protagonist in Flowers for Algernon. The first several chapters, the one dimensional Charlie jots in his journal is torture for speed readers, grammar-nazis, spell-checkers and me.
The novel also has a distinct fifties-sixties anti-feminist vibe to it, like the Catcher in the Rye or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A few chapters in, Charlie is seen progressing through his Holden Caulfield phase - a moody, self-absorbed, misogynistic male. There are archetypal female characters propping Charlie up as he goes up and down the slippery IQ slope. It was probably an edgy read in the sixties and seventies. It reads very dated as in outdated and uni-dimensional now. I was expecting a good cry at the end as this was supposedly the reaction most readers had in the end, after being profoundly moved by the plight of Charlie. I almost cried over the time I wasted reading Daniel Keyes essential soft-core reading for sixties dudes.
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