I found Jodi Picoult’s passing portrayal of a young man with a developmental disability gratuitous and sloppily drawn. Curtis Sittenfeld, on the other hand, has written movingly (if passingly) of young men with special needs with grace and insight and caring. In “American Wife,” Alice Blackwell (the fictionalized Laura Bush character) sits next to a young man with a disability at a fundraising dinner.
Though I suspect Dale had the intellectual aptitude of a nine- or ten-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed this if I’d been observing him from any distance–his featurers weren’t irregular, except perhaps that he looked friendlier than most …read more

It’s not easy to watch certain movies or read certain books, ever since Alex came along. I do like to keep up with how people with developmental disabilities are being portrayed, so I make it my business to watch movies like “Pumpkin” “Rain Man” and keep up with books like Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
But then I come across something like the following in one of Jodi Picoult’s novels ripped from a newspaper’s front page. In this case, a high school boy who’s been bullied since kindergarten is in prison awaiting trial after shooting …read more