UPWARD BOUND

Residents and workers at a care facility for autistic adults attempt to interact across the divide of disability.

Los Angeles’ Upward Bound is in some ways the average day care: “the locked cupboards with the craft supplies and toys.…there was a scruffy little play area in the far back.” The difference here is the clientele; rather than catering to children, Upward Bound provides care for disabled, mostly autistic, adults. In his debut novel, which reads like a collection of linked short stories, Brown details the lives of both the “typical” people who work at Upward Bound and a range of clients. There’s Walter, an autistic adult who takes pride in his Associate of Arts degree and his ability to communicate via letter board—and occasional echolalia in the form of phrases from TV scripts, especially episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine. There’s staff lifeguard Ann, who forms a crush on one of the clients with cerebral palsy during a summer shift before her senior year of college. Bumbling Dave, who moved to LA from Kentucky with dreams of being a Hollywood actor, forces his group to enact his ambitions via a holiday show. Brown—who was the first nonspeaking autistic graduate of UCLA—offers a vanishingly rare glimpse of the interiority of nonverbal autistic adults and a critique of the well-meaning but often misguided neurotypical people in their orbits. It’s jarring to have multiple characters use the R-word to describe those neurologically different from themselves—whether that’s a neurotypical person describing an autistic person or an autistic person describing someone with more profound disabilities. Perhaps Brown’s point is that it’s human nature to punch down—a sobering note in a novel that’s mostly full of humor and charm.

A debut novel that truly breaks new ground.