Rated 5 out of 5. First posted on Goodreads. More on the reading page.

Flowers for Algernon is a hauntingly beautiful and tragic paean to the indomitability of the human spirit whose exploration of the starkly different sets of experience that lie at the ends of the continuum illuminates the thread that runs through our shared humanity. Through the protagonist’s journey from the wallowing to the rarefied and back, we gain access to an incisive and unique perspective that lays bare the tenuous nature of all that we hold dear — friendship, family, love, status — and forces us to confront the harsh cruelty that is meted out to those less fortunate, all while reminding us of our own fragility and how easily and inevitably the tables will entropically turn.

FAA is about a man and a mouse, Charlie and Algernon, whose fates are inextricably intertwined through their involvement in a scientific experiment designed to skyrocket their intelligence. After scientists at the fictitious Beekman University in New York achieve success with a novel technique that improves Algernon’s intelligence substantially, they decide to extend the experiment to humans by trying it out on Charlie, a 32 year old cleaner at a bakery with an IQ of 68. It works and the result leads to a tremendous transformation in both Charlie and his relation to the world. This new-found intelligence compels him to grapple with his past — a traumatic childhood and dysfunctional relationships with his family — as well as reevaluate his present, in a longing for self understanding that was long denied. This quest turns intensely desperate as Algernon begins to show signs of deterioration…

Flowers for Algernon is science fiction at its finest, made all the more brilliant by Keyes’ narrative style that is superbly inventive yet never gimmicky and the exquisite bursts of poetry that shine like brushed gold -

“And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other’s arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other—child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death. But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.”

Couldn’t have asked for a better book to get me reading again 🙂

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As an aside of potential interest, this book made me revisit the notion of IQ and how empirically sound it is. Once the gold standard of psychometrics and the poster child of western psychology, the validity of an Intelligent Quotient is a highly contentious topic with accomplished thinkers taking both sides of the aisle.

On the IQ is hogwash team for instance, there is Prof Steven Piantadosi, a computational psychology professor at UC Berkeley who wrote a damning twitter thread pointing out the innate flaws of IQ tests and their dependence on WERID cultural artefacts (https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1275783954411347968) and Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese-American author, scholar and famed acerbic tweeter, calling IQ ‘pseudoscientific swindle’ and a result of psychologists being statistically incompetent (https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39)

On the other hand, you’ll find plenty of scientists and thinkers who will reaffirm that IQ is one of the most robust, replicated findings in the entire field of psychology. Here’s Richard Haier, Professor Emeritus at the University of California Irvine (https://quillette.com/2017/12/24/neuroscience-intelligence-interview-richard-haier/) and Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/). Luminaries like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker have also frequently made statements that fall in this camp.

As with everything nowadays, IQ has been subsumed by the Culture Wars, and it’s hard to know who’s following the data versus who’s conforming to their tribe. A large part of this politicisation can be traced back to an infamously controversial book - ‘The Bell Curve’ by Charles Murray - and its nuclear fallout. This post on The Dish by Andrew Sullivan seems to capture the breadth of modern discourse well (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/my-record-on-race-and-iq) (I have not read all the posts)

I’ll end by noting that unlike a lot of academic debate, this one has monumental consequences as much of our society is premised on the existence of a form of general cognitive function that can be accurately and consistently measured. If it turns out to be all made up, we’re going to have some soul searching to do.