The aesthetic sensation a reader gets from the neuronovel is not the pleasure of finding the general in the particular, but a frustration born of the defeat of the metaphoric impulse. We want to make the metaphor work, to say, “Yes, we are all a bit like a paranoid schizophrenic sometimes” or, “Yes, as Mark Haddon’s autistic narrator needs to separate the foods on his plate and not let them touch, to sort colors into good and bad, so am I in my impulse to classify a new genre.” But this would be to indulge the worst tendency of literary criticism, whether of a jargony and sectarian or burbling and humanistic type: to insist on meaning or relevance when there isn’t any, or when the works themselves actually foreclose it. Instead the reader has to admit to himself that his brain doesn’t work like an autistic person’s, a Capgras sufferer’s, and that when he loves or works or fears or talks, his ordinary neurons fire or misfire for ordinary rather than extraordinary reasons, whatever these may be.But I'm not actually sure that's real. To the extent that I'm drawn to neuronovels, it's to the extent that I'm afraid my mind is going to...stop working at some point. Or that the same thing will happen to someone I love. And I want to know that behind the diagnosis and the frightening behavior will still be a person.
The Life of the Mind
It strikes me that Marco Roth's n+1 essay about the rise of the neuronovel, works of fiction from the perspective of characters suffering or interacting with people who suffer from, specific neurological disorders is interesting, but a little uncharitable to readers. He writes: