Flowers for Algernon Paperback – June 14, 2004

I first saw ‘Charly,’ the film adaptation of Daniel Keyes’ 1966 novel ‘Flowers for Algernon’ in 1969, was very impressed and when I saw a movie tie-in edition of the novel I bought it. I believe I finally got around to reading the novel in the summer between high school graduation and the beginning of college in 1973. I was immediately struck by the stylistic approach (I hesitate to call it a ‘gimmick’ because I think it was the perfect way to tell this story), a series of ‘progris riport’s, in the mentally impaired man Charlie Gordon’s very limited writing style, at least in the beginning. I knew the story but even if I hadn’t seen the movie, I could flip the pages from the beginning of the novel to the end and the stylistic advancement, slowly regressing to something resembling the beginning, would know the trajectory of the plot.Although the story went through various forms (short story, teleplay, novel, film), I consider the novel to be the definitive version of this profound and heartbreaking story. Charlie is chronologically in his early thirties but his mental age is probably seven or eight. He was taken to a special home for mentally handicapped children and then offered a job at a bakery with a cheap apartment nearby from a kind man named Mr. Donner. He mostly does custodial jobs at the bakery and, even though he realizes that his co-workers play practical jokes on him, he considers them his friends because they are all laughing at him. The key word here is “laughing.” As long as he laughs with them, he feels appreciated.Charlie takes remedial writing classes at a center for adults with special needs taught by Miss Alice Kinnian. Miss Kinnian is beautiful, kind, and patient with Charlie so it is easy to see how Charlie can develop a “crush” on her. Through her he learns about the testing being done by Professor Nemur at the college. He immediately begins maze “racing” with Algernon, a little white mouse that has been injected with an experimental drug that is designed to improve mental capacity. They are interested in testing it out on a human and want to know if Charlie is interested. They know there are some risks of it not working and ask him if he is still interested in the surgical procedure. It doesn’t take long for simple-minded Charlie to want to get smarter, even if he is just able to beat Algernon in the maze race.After the operation there are not immediate results but Charlie is beginning to grow impatient about going through the same exercises, racing Algernon, until he beats him. That thrill wears off as his writing and reading begin to improve. His rapidly increased mental abilities soon surpass even the teachers and the testers. He felt isolated and lonely before, when he didn’t understand that his “friends” at the bakery where he worked were playing jokes on him. They laughed and he laughed with them and accepted their laughter as friendship. When his intelligence increases, he notices one of his co-workers undercharging a customer and pocketing the extra change as a tip. The winks exchanged between the co-worker and the customer indicate that they’re both in on the scam. Charlie is now faced with a moral dilemma.After not getting a satisfactory answer for how to handle the problem, Charlie brings it up with the co-worker, wanting advice for a “friend” who has seen his co-worker stealing from the boss. The co-worker says that his “friend” should mind his own business. This confrontation plants a barrier between Charlie and his co-workers, who start a petition to have Charlie fired.Charlie suddenly has an extreme mismatch between his accelerating intelligence and extremely erratic emotions. He knows he’s in love with Alice Kinnian but he can’t express himself without making her uncomfortable. Every time he tries to express himself sexually, the negative association with sexual expression whenever Charlie’s mother scolded him—incontinence and nausea—will emerge as a ‘fail-safe’ behavioral intervention.As Charlie’s intelligence grows exponentially, he feels isolated from others because he has outstripped everyone around him and can’t carry on an intellectual conversation with anyone on his own level—no one is on his level.He meets a new neighbor, an uninhibited and sexually aggressive artist named Fay Lillman. She sees the three-dimensional maze Charlie has built for Algernon (Charlie ‘kidnapped’ Algernon) and sees it as a piece of ‘living’ art. Charlie can’t communicate on an intellectual level with her but he can express himself sexually with her and bypass “Charlie’s” behavioral panic device by seeing it as purely physical. He is not in love with Fay as he is with Alice.He has now observed enough of the behavior of Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss to realize that they don’t see him as a human but as their most successful experiment. Nemur, in particular, dismisses any objections that Charlie puts forth and sees this experiment as a way to enhance his own reputation.When Algernon begins to slow down and not run the maze as fast and actually begins the self-destructive behavior of flinging himself against the walls of the cage, Charlie understands that there is a flaw in the experiment that, if it makes Algernon regress, will probably affect him as well.For a while, Charlie is at a peak of mental and physical energy:‘It’s as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I’ve found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon—very soon—it will burst into consciousness. Let me solve this one problem. I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had.’Charlie has used his phenomenal brain power while he has it to formulate the “Algernon-Gordon Effect,’ diagnosing the flaw in the experiment and stating, theoretically, what will ultimately happen to Algernon and himself.After Charlie has given his ‘Algernon-Gordon Effect’ thesis to Nemur and Strauss and vowed that he won’t return for any more testing, he returns and finds Alice asleep on his couch. After her admission that she is coming to him now that they might both be on the same level, emotionally, they make love and Charlie realizes that they are both entwined in a spiritual/physical embrace. They both know that they can only be together for a short time. She has agreed to leave when he tells her the time has come. That time is approximately a week later. His ability to read and comprehend deteriorates and his irritability at her attempts to tidy up his apartment and drop useful books in obvious places for him to find lead him to resent her presence there. She packs up and leaves.If there is any consolation in Charlie’s retrograde intelligence, it is the lack of ability to grieve in advance for all the beautiful things that will be lost. The Charlie that has returned with an IQ of 68 may be less intelligent but he feels unfiltered gratitude, no longer tethered to inductive reasoning or a hyperawareness of tragedy:‘If you ever reed this Miss Kinnian dont be sorry for me. Im glad I got a second chanse in life like you said to be smart because I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this werld and Im grateful I saw it all even for a littel bit…Anyway I bet Im the frist dumb persen in the world who found out some thing importent for sience. I did something but I don’t remember what. So I gess its like I did it for all the dumb pepul like me…’

This is an incredibly emotional and beautiful story. I believe it should be read multiple times and studied in depth for all it has to offer. Keyes has touched upon so many wonderful concepts.Here are a few takeaway gems:We are all retarded. The average I.Q. worldwide is approximately 100. That is not too bright. Yet the average person is confident that he is making sound decisions as he eats processed food and putrid meat, while barely exercising. His attention span is pitiful and he fills his brain by passively scrolling on his smartphone (what an ironic name for our phones) or by watching many muscular men throwing funny shaped balls or punching other men. To break the monotony of watching sports, he watches the same repetitive movie plot over and over again as the hero kills forty Yakuza or Russian gangsters in fifteen seconds. When the action movies get boring he watches handsome and pretty actors imitating the lives of others because he doesn't dare to live his own. The average Joe is very likely prone to poverty, depression, ignorance, STD's, and bad health. I doubt most people even floss, or know how to wipe their butts properly. Yet when it comes to voting for POTUS, most people are positive they are making the right decision while screaming at the idiots who vote for the other party. Meanwhile the average American has a reading level of a 7th or 8th grader!Like Charlie, we are all born as cute morons who stare at the world in dull astonishment (i.e. stupidly) as we are amazed by the mobile toy above our cribs, supposedly for our cognitive stimulation. We then progress as we are amused by wind-up barking dogs and plastic dolls as we progress to concepts of religion and faith in government and authority. Then we are entertained by fantastical fireworks and Disneyland. For those with a higher I.Q. (Charlie with an I.Q. of 280) who easily see through the smoke-profits of Disney, we stare at the stars and fathom multi-universes. Little do we realize that even if we had the intelligence and power of God, we would still get bored and find ourselves creating more worlds.All of us, rich and highly intelligent or poor and dumb (feel free to mix and match), run like mice for cheese (money, fame, pu**y, glory, eternal life). And whether the cheese is a five-star dinner or a Big Mac "happy meal," we eat, shit, piss, and ejaculate like animals. Some of us believe we're sophisticated because we wear expensive clothing, jewelry, and Rolex watches, while speaking six languages as we jet around the world. But we've never really passed the stage of hunter/gatherers who will do anything for a paycheck, or to impress a female to mate with. We are not as complicated or as dramatic as we believe we are. We race through a cage called "existence," and the faster we run the sooner we arrive nowhere.Even if we were able to travel a thousand light years to some distant earthlike planet we would have barely moved. We would not even have walked across our lawn-universe to visit our next door neighbor. The entire universe is just one gigantic maze-cage. And, like Algernon and Charlie, we are all mice. And too many of us are rats.We all travel through a maze called "life" in the belief that we have free will and are making wise decisions, as we hurry to an imaginary "have it all" finish line for eternal cheese, when in reality we are just bumping into situations that force us to turn right or left as we race to our graves. And no matter how many hats we wear, or how fast we run to conquer the cheese-world, or to add more digits of monopoly money into our savings account, we will all wind up on a gurney, and eventually as fertilizer and ultimately as elements in space.If we live long enough we will all regress like Charlie as we, once again, shit ourselves and try to remember things that we so easily grasped just the day before. Like Charlie, we were born with empty minds and we become "wise," as we became conditioned by the society in which we live. We grew up thinking that our ideas and beliefs are our own, when in reality we just mimicked the generation that birthed us, as we in turn give birth to the next generation of racing mice, who will mimic us, as they worship Allah, God, Buddha, or Jesus, depending on how their ancient predecessors were forced to believe, by their ancient "wise" men/wise-guy "leaders" (who constantly took their cheese - and all too often, their lives). The more fortunate among us believe we are more educated and tolerant, when in reality we are merely sheep who quickly follow the falsely super-confident "leader" (who is polling our every fantasy of how we want them to lead us). Then, no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, it all dissipates as we age. As they say in Jamaica, "Once an adult; twice a child."What I love about this book is that, like Charlie, we all start out as simpletons. As children we observe, but barely understand, as we marvel the new world around us and wonder at it all, as we are easily amused by the barking toy dog or plastic doll I mentioned earlier. We grow up with false beliefs in our government, parents, religious leaders, educators, and politicians. As we age, we realize that we trusted fools. We then think that we now see things clearly when, in reality, we are duped idiots as we stare at more sophisticated toys called "precious" diamonds and castles, or silicone infused breasts, while jealously admiring someone else's wife or their fifteen minutes of fame. It's all an illusion. We still remain as childish as Charlie in his imbecilic state of mind. For those of us who finally mature and grow old, we realize that no one really knows anything. Even scientists have barely dented the surface by the depth of one atom compared to how much they don't know. As we further age, we then lose our memories and experiences, our accumulated knowledge, our wealth, our minds, and eventually our lives. It is so touching when Charlie becomes a child again. It is almost as if he was lobotomized and he then leads a calm and simple existence once again where he barely remembers that he did something important. The question is, "Did he really?" We are saddened by the fact that Charlie is "back where he started from." In a way, Charlie is happy. We are sad that he is happy. Because we still believe that Charlie was disqualified from the race of running through the maze of life. In truth, if we understood that we've been given a low I.Q. (whether it's 90 or 180) for a short while (70 to 80 years) we would perhaps also stop running like Charlie did (in his genius mode) as he searched for a solution to his problems of curing feeble minds.Sadly, what Charlie never understood, even in his genius stage, is that we will forever remain caged in a maze as long as we believe we are not in one. Very few of us are destined to escape the maze. The only way out is by stopping the search for the exit.

This is a book I read as a very advanced reader in 5th or 6th grade, then again as an assignment in high school, and I bought the Kindle version to read it again now.The writing style may not be for everyone. Typos bug me, but intentional typos for effect can be powerful as this writer shows. However, I can see how it can be confusing to readers who are ESL or who don't automatically recognize it as part of the character development. The style is important in many ways, though, including as a method of tracking both the improvement and then the decline of the main character. One thing I found interesting was when Charly commented that he had been asked to make his written reports understandable to the reader by avoiding words that were too complex.It is definitely a product of the time it was written, showing some societal norms of the time as a commonplace which today would be questionable (smoking cigarettes, sexual interactions, gender roles, the Warren house's existence); however that adds to the plot and character development.The mild sexual content, and the need for connection to others which is addressed in the material helps us see that people with mental challenges need to be treated as human beings. They have desires and emotions just like everyone does.It is a powerful commentary on labels, on what society sees as normal, on the fleeting nature of intelligence (not only shown through the main character but also with his mother's senility - a more accepted affliction in some ways), and on scientific studies in general.I can't give it 5 stars, mostly because it is so dated, but I almost did.