Bernice Friesen

Charlie, the extraordinary protagonist of Bernice Friesen’s extraordinary novel Universal Disorder, finds solace in the regularity and reliability of numbers. A propulsive bildungsroman, the novel follows Charlie’s anything-but-straightforward journey from a chaotic childhood (estranged parents, alcoholic father) in rural Saskatchewan to Montreal’s scientific community, where, after a series of traumatic missteps, he becomes a sought-after researcher and leader in the fields of astrophysics and number theory. Charlie, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, has difficulty interpreting social cues—facial expressions, body language—and finds most human interactions bewildering and frustrating. But Charlie is a gifted mathematics prodigy, and despite his social shortcomings excels academically to the extent that in his early twenties he has moved to Montreal to work on a physics Ph.D. Friesen spends much of the novel’s middle section describing this crucial period in Charlie’s life, with emphasis on his relationship with Jae, an art student with a wild side, and her friends Tamsin and Dom, who seek adventure in Montreal’s bohemian community. Over time, as Charlie is drawn deeper into Jae’s circle, he becomes detached from his research and loses his focus. As his emotional attachment to Jae progresses into obsession, Charlie’s struggle to fit in and to comprehend his own feelings drives him to extreme behaviour. Ultimately, tragically, he alienates the very person he wants close to him, and the mental breakdown that follows derails the next ten years his life. It is to Bernice Friesen’s great credit that throughout the book Charlie’s voice comes across as authentic and his frequent agonizing over what other people expect of him is unfailingly persuasive. The narrative is vividly imagined, and the story can be funny, moving and suspenseful. A minor caveat is that one finishes the book feeling that some of Charlie’s tormented ruminations on life and love tread ground already covered and could have been excised or condensed without compromising the story. That said, in Universal Disorder, Bernice Friesen has written a uniquely original work of fiction, one that takes the reader into the turbulent mind of an exceptional young man who sees and experiences the world very differently than most of us.… (mehr)