Anne's Reviews > Flowers for Algernon

There is nothing specific in this book that dates it -- it could have been written 4 years ago instead of 40 -- except for it's obsession with a certain brand of psychology and sex with near strangers. In this way, it just screams "I WAS WRITTEN IN THE 60s!"

I dunno. Books from this era just bug me in general. They are so smugly sure of their analysis of the whys and wherefores of human nature, yet they still cling to the archetypes. Charlie knows The Puffed-up Scientist and The Down-to-earth Scientist. The women in his life are The Cruel Mother, The Whore, and The Angel. (One of the reasons this book screams the 60s is because The Angel is ok with his relationship with The Whore. In fact, she encourages it. Brilliant. Can we tell the author was a man and the book was written in the era of "free love"?) All of this in a book that is supposed to be about a man coming to grips with new found intelligence without turning into an intellectual jerk and divining the REAL NATURE of the women in his life. Am I the only one who sees the irony of this?

People were, and are, ga-ga about this book. And while I think that the premise is interesting, all the futz surrounding the premise was formulaic.

Snore.