Not a good novel for a nonspeaking autistic person; it’s a good novel, period ... Flourishes of poetic grandness are relatively sparse in these pages. Brown is typically content with the careful accumulation of ordinary details and muted feelings that have fermented into a private liquor of determination ... A signature gentleness speaks through all these characters. Brown inhabits every one with an uncanny sensitivity to their hopes and anxieties.
Upward Bound is good. I recommend it. The novel takes the form of an interlocking set of stories about the clients and staff at a day-care center for adults with disabilities in Southern California. Its 12 chapters are written from the viewpoints of eight different characters. Their voices are engaging and distinct, and their efforts at communication—the tiny social cues they either catch or miss—are cataloged in careful detail. It’s as if the book were written to refute the classic notion that autistic people’s deficits result from a malfunctioning 'theory of mind.' The book is, if nothing else, a master class in making sense of mental states—a perspective-taking flex.
Upward Bound is at pains to emphasise the difference of its characters – the range of conditions and presentations that complicate this community of outcasts. No one person is alike or even necessarily on the same page, and so the book gives us multiple viewpoints ... Brown’s prose draws connections and pulls his figures into focus ... As for Brown, his story arc as a novelist is just getting started, and it’s hard to imagine a more vertiginous lift-off than this ... Upward Bound is also funny and moving and ringing with life; a book that embraces the difficulty and contradictions of its subject matter.
Brown’s sly sense of humor and ability to inhabit, without condescension, the experiences of those often marginalized, including the bumbling but well-intentioned caregivers, make the novel both quietly surprising and gently enlightening.
Debut novelist Woody Brown ’24SOA knows his material well. Like Walter and Jorge, he is autistic ... His ability to articulate the inner lives, the enormous frustrations, and the very real dreams of characters who are constantly underestimated by society is stunning and eye-opening ... But Brown is far more than a megaphone for the disabled community ... Being a human — any human — is complex and challenging and joyful and tragic in countless ways. And everyone, as Brown’s novel seems to scream, deserves a voice.
Brown...offers a vanishingly rare glimpse of the interiority of nonverbal autistic adults and a critique of the well-meaning but often misguided neurotypical people in their orbits. It’s jarring to have multiple characters use the R-word to describe those neurologically different from themselves—whether that’s a neurotypical person describing an autistic person or an autistic person describing someone with more profound disabilities. Perhaps Brown’s point is that it’s human nature to punch down—a sobering note in a novel that’s mostly full of humor and charm. A debut novel that truly breaks new ground.
