Michael Bérubé’s The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read, comes at a time of great interest in the relatively young but rapidly proliferating field of disability studies. Bérubé, who has been teaching and writing about literature and disability for twenty years, touches on the possibility of a peculiarly American conception of disability; the book is full of such hints at new critical avenues. In the sustained attack on evocriticism – or “literary Darwinism” – comprising the bulk of the conclusion, Bérubé expresses his astonishment that no literary Darwinist has discussed Proust and the Squid (2007) by Maryanne Wolf, “a real scientist, not a literary critic with a secondary interest in evolution and neuroscience” (187). One would rather hope that Bérubé takes the task upon himself. Though he attempts to contextualize his passionate assault on evocriticism, this is the only part of the book that seems out of place in a space that, up to this point, has been concerned with how representations of intellectual disability impact textual operations, rather than the innumerable faults of literary Darwinism and its implications for disability, which have already been articulated satisfactorily by several of Bérubé’s peers.Footnote ¹ Nonetheless, the conclusion does something to magnify what is not only an eloquent display of how understanding intellectual disability in texts illuminates a whole host of new critical material, but also a treatise on the meaningful implications of studying texts that “pose the question, in the starkest of terms, of how to treat the most vulnerable humans among us” (103). Bérubé does not disengage from larger social questions, even while he keeps a laser focus on the texts at hand. He writes of what is at stake for William Faulkner's Benjy in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and, it seems, for disability studies too: “Everything is to be gained by disarticulating ‘degree of function’ from ‘degree of human worth’” (57).

The compactness of The Secret Life of Stories helps keep the readings, ranging on a scale from critiqued-to-death (The Sound and the Fury) to never-heard-of-it (Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip (1964)), gripping throughout. The chapters are organized by the effect of fictional intellectual disabilities on time, motive, and self-awareness. Bérubé is careful to distinguish between a text being about disability and a text trying to textualize disability. He describes the disabilities represented in the chosen narratives as fictional, and avoids diagnostic impulses, which can “preclude us from asking broader interpretive questions about plot and motive” (130). Thus the “infinite self-reflexivity” (142) of Cervantes's Don Quixote (1615) and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) takes precedence over questions whether Haddon's portrayal of autism is “accurate,” or whether the brand of delusion Don Quixote exhibits represents a particular mental illness.

By avoiding the limitations of “character X has Y disability” (130) – Bérubé cites David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's influential Narrative Prosthesis as falling short here – the author is free to pursue more productive avenues.Footnote ² One of the most exciting things about The Secret Life of Stories is how Bérubé manages to enliven texts that have grown dried and shriveled from near-constant critical minings. His treatment of Benjy is the clearest example of this: Bérubé deviates from other disability scholars and zeroes in on Benjy's nonnormative sense of time.Footnote ³ Bérubé sets up this interrogation with a method that makes The Secret Life of Stories uncommonly engaging: stories about his two children, Nick and Jamie, who are occasional subjects of their father's narrative “experiments,” and just as often contribute ideas to his projects. A young Nick could read but not necessarily make sense of the opening paragraph of The Sound and the Fury, and neither could any of Bérubé’s undergraduate students, despite its relatively simple grammar and vocabulary. The reason? Benjy “has a sense of time that does not make sense to us,” says the author (75). The chapters on motive and self-awareness offer similarly intriguing foci. Consider the unique grouping of Don Quixote, Pirandello's Henry IV, and the sci-fi comedy film Galaxy Quest (dir. Dean Parisot, 1999). These narratives, Bérubé writes, involve characters with a “diminished or non-existent capacity for metarepresentation, and who thereby (a) produce metafictional textual effects, and (b) in the course of producing metafictional effects, break their narratives’ fictional frame in such a way as to confirm it” (144).

Bérubé is understandably reluctant to link his work with social justice, but as he himself notes, “Who in disability studies – who in any realm of endeavor – would want to pursue an inquiry into the representation of disability in literature that did not have implications and possible consequences for the lives of people with disabilities?” (52, original emphasis). There is a push–pull at play here between the social possibilities for literary disability studies and reading for the sake of reading. Regardless of where Bérubé lands, his work is an example of how productive disability studies can be. He has convincingly demonstrated how understanding intellectual disability in these narratives fundamentally alters and enhances the reader's experience.