Re:View - Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon (1966)

It is sometimes said in the critical community of particularly good media that even if their authors had not written/composed/directed/painted anything apart from the work in question, “I would be entirely satisfied”, or other words to that end. This could not be a statement more insipid, or a cliché ghastlier. The truth, hidden behind the excited pomp of hyperbole, is that the speaker would gladly take anything they can get their hands on from a particular creator. To put it into perspective, would anyone really be happy if Picasso just painted Guernica, or if Scorcese only directed Raging Bull? Certainly, one might be hypothetically content in one’s ignorance of the ‘alternate’ universe where Dickens wrote more than just Oliver Twist, but we don’t live in a world where that’s an alternate universe, so why wish you did?

With that said, I honestly would have been entirely happy if Daniel Keyes hadn’t written a word after March 1966, because then I wouldn’t feel so disappointed that he didn’t give the world an extra library chocka with more classic soft sci fi like Flowers for Algernon. Keyes’ further work, mostly in the crime genre, attained none of the same recognition as his delicate 1966 fable about mentally handicapped bakery janitor, Charlie Gordon. An experimental operation virtually triples his intelligence, instigating his latent intellectual and emotional adolescence, at age 32. The novel chronicles the personal and scientific fallout from the procedure, covering Charlie’s first experiences of love, morality, culture, and crucially, individual selfhood.

Matthew Modine gets a chance at a new life after this Canadian TV Movie adaptation aired in 2000? Stranger Things have happened, I suppose...

Keyes’ other novelistic forays include; The Fifth Sally (1980), a tale of a woman with multiple personality disorder unaware she is living four separate lives, one of which is as a vicious murderer, whose fragmented mind her psychiatrist attempts to coagulate into a singular person; The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981), a true crime story involving the first successful use of multiple personality disorder in a court defence against a rape charge; and The Asylum Prophecies (2009), where a woman realises that in order to prevent an upcoming terrorist attack, she needs to break out of her institutionalised confines, as well as from her own multiple personality disorder.

The perceptive amongst you may have noticed a particular trend in Keyes’ post-Algernon novels. Aside from his odd fixation with multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia, his latter works lose the poetic originality and elegance of the Algernon premise. They riff too hard on what we have already seen, either off of Flowers for Algernon itself, or the monolith of generic dime-store paperback crime and psychological thrillers. His debut’s mythic simplicity and creativity has been both dulled by its reiteration, and forgotten altogether, disappointingly, in favour of the road more travelled by, to paraphrase the great Robert Frost.

"So anyway, after I killed the real author of Algerno- Wait, we're not still filming, right?" The writer, photographed by Beth Gwinn.

These subsequent novels may revolutionise their respective genres, be wholly unique experiences in their own right, hold cult classic status, yet frankly, I don’t care, because they will never transcend the formal chains in which Keyes has fettered them before writing a single word. The beauty of Flowers for Algernon is that it defies the conventions that generically pigeonhole its story. The sci-fi convention of “uplift” (the boosting of an organism’s intelligence by another, more intelligent life form) is incidental to the wider conflict and duality of Charlie’s newfound awareness. It seems to be far more ‘literary’ (for want of a better descriptor), even in its premise, than anything Keyes had written afterwards.

Algernon’s timelessness holds a certain magnetism that is impossible to resist. Truly, there is little in the creative market today which possesses the originality of Keyes’ debut. One need only examine the countless adaptations of the novel on the big screen, the small screen, the stage, the radio and even as a musical. Charlie’s transformation has been retold in nations as varied as Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Australia and Japan.

Prefer heading to the West End to endless reams of text on the page? You're in luck, as you can still experience the story of a dude and his juiced up brain on stage, now with song and dance! Huzzah!

The most central brilliance of the novel is the watertight, heart-wrenching plot that propels its characters along wonderfully satisfying arcs. The inciting event of Charlie’s operation lends itself to excellent character development, and no individual is left unaccounted for. Every character grows into a different person when the dust settles, but far from cheaply. Keyes settles not for one dimensional reversals of specific traits but for complex vacillatory emotion, not overexplaining actions which would otherwise seem totally bizarre. This profound sensitivity towards the erratic movements of the human heart creates characters with real souls to go underneath their flesh and bones.

Keyes’ presentation of Charlie, however, is the standout. In few sci-fi stories have I ever seen such a strongly realised voice. Although the character of Charlie is essentially playing two archetypes (the simpleton and the nerd), his humour, interactions with others, as well as the nuances of his turbulent emotional life render him immensely unique. Both these idiosyncrasies as well as hallmarks of his maturing intellectual state are developed in extraordinarily well-crafted prose from Daniel Keyes, who pushes language and formally innovates in exciting ways to communicate Charlie’s ever-expanding thinking.

Charlie Gordon becomes someone undergoing infinitely relatable periods in his life, despite the reader most likely having neither an intellectual disability nor supreme universal genius. Particularly impressive is the transition of his intelligence from one level to another. Handled with admirable patience, and often eking out the heaviest emotional response from the reader, Keyes pulls off an impressive piece of narrative showmanship. Charlie might now be able to read War and Peace in a single day, smash through an obscure bit of Pakistani medical literature written in urdu without breaking a sweat, before casually making a breakthrough in calculus that baffles even the brightest minds, but avoiding the pitfalls of social interaction, understanding the primal force of sexual desire, and learning what it means to be alive proves as difficult for him as it does the rest of us simpletons.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia S9E8 - "Flowers for Charlie". The mark of a good book is that it can be endlessly parodied, without seeming the lesser for it.

In a mere 200 pages, Keyes manages to make organically blossom not only the aforementioned character growth, but also intricate thematic conflicts. Trauma, happiness, hypocrisy, academia, relationships, listlessness, to name a select few. One may think that complex elaborations on subjects such as the scientific method and military economics have little place outside the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon or the encyclopaedia. However, they are woven expertly into the novel’s beguiling take on the sci-fi genre, with not a madcap spaceship battle or an alien life form in sight. The plot is marked by passages of such powerful descriptive beauty and complexity it is staggering that it doesn’t feel out of place or unwarranted – where we see glimpses of the poetic purity of the tale, and briefly touch the universal. The closest you’ll get to an alien here? Human beings, and the inscrutable things they do or say sometimes, which so often appear unknowable.

Keyes is careful not to intellectualise his novel so it becomes a dry and sub-zero affair. Throughout, a fiery emotional core is maintained with some kindling of great dialogue and wise, insightful commentary. Flowers for Algernon is thus far the only novel to draw tears from my eyes, and right on the final page to boot. Its emotional resonance is unlike anything I’ve read in years, containing a level of writerly empathy with its subjects that is utterly sublime. With an achievement so unusual, it seems to me a vanity project to nitpick flaws in its construction, though doubtlessly they exist somewhere. Daniel Keyes has unequivocally written a sci-fi masterwork (in this writer’s opinion). It is a story to live on for generations, about the symbiotic entwinement of venality and virtue, self and other, past and present, without becoming overwrought, confused or trite. It’s a work of rawness and vulnerability that should be required reading for anyone caught between the two extremes of intelligence. I’d wager that’s most of you reading.