Flowers for Algernon

I recently read Flowers for Algernon. It was a pretty good book, about a ‘moron’ who becomes a supergenuis and some of the difficulties that he encountered. The book doesn’t look at that from an intellectual viewpoint after he gets up to an IQ of about 95-100 – rather it focuses on the social aspect of his increased intelligence. The authors point seems to be that increased intelligence is associated with having fewer friends – although this is not clear as he spends little time (in the book) in the normal IQ range. He is mostly dumb dumb dumb and then smart, smart smart. My own feeling is that friends would need to be similar in intelligence for a deep broad friendship to exist.
There is also a sidepoint that despite all of our surface intellect strong undercurrents that you might call ‘animal spirits’ or ‘conditioned responses’ control our emotions and shape our lives despite all of our smarts. Pretty good, but I think it left plenty material unaddressed that another similar book could cover. I highly recommend it – it is very touching.

On a tangent: My English teachers in High School and a lesser extent in college always would tell me. “Show don’t tell.” Which I took to mean something like this: when describing a character instead of saying: X is smart, allow the reader to make that conclusion by his conversation, diction etc. I think there is a lot of value in it, but, I think this principle needs a little bit of moderation. For example, for an author to portray somebody who is much smarter than them or outside of the experience of his readers requires telling not showing. So, in Flowers for Algernon, we see a good example of the author showing the main character getting smarter at first but later he reverts to mainly telling us with some vague showing – professors don’t have anything to say to his topics of conversation – he writes a paper. This still works though, because we of only average or slightly above average intelligence can only see that vaguely whereas in the first part we can see clearly how he is getting smarter and smarter.