The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion
There's a moment in the first chapter of The Rosie Project that pretty much tells you what it's all about. Don TIllman, professor of genetics, gets roped into giving a presentation on the autism spectrum to a support group. Forgetting the first rule of presentations, "know your audience," he prepares a highly technical discussion. The parents become restless at terminology that's over their heads, but the Asperger's kids in the room home in on him like one of their own… which he apparently is.
Don Tillman is handsome, fit, highly focused, intelligent, and has a good job; at age 39 a prime candidate for marriage. He's also obsessive and startlingly inept in any remotely social situation, which pretty much offsets those good attributes. When he decides he needs a wife, Don approaches the problem the same way he approaches any undertaking: he creates The Wife Project, complete with a questionnaire to screen out unlikely candidates.
It's not going well when Rosie Jarman shows up. She's all the things Don is not: impulsive, unpredictable, unscheduled. Never have two people seemed more unsuited; but something about Rosie has captured his imagination. The two embark on a new undertaking, The Father Project, which finds Don breaking not only his own rules but also flirting with career disaster.
| The first novel from Australian Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project is equal parts heartwarming and hilarious. American readers will have no problem visualizing the socially-clumsy, rather obsessive Don Tillman as a pastiche of Sheldon Cooper and Mr. Spock, but that makes him no less a goof in all his glory. And as for Rosie, well, she combines all the best parts of Daisy Buchanan with a dash of Janis Joplin (or, if you're old enough to remember, Goldie Hawn's hippie-chick presence in "Laugh In"). All that probably plays well with American audiences even if the couple are from Oz; well enough that Amazon named Rosie one of 2013's ten best books, and Sony Pictures optioned the novel for a movie. |
Simsion's novel is written from Tillman's point of view, which tends to be borderline hilarious all on its own. When Don explains the reason for any part of his regimen to Rosie, the reader sees through his eyes as the young lady explodes his rationalization without a backwards glance. What's most charming, perhaps, is the way that Rosie only provides the first crack in the armor of Don's carefully managed lifestyle - it's Tillman himself that tears down the final walls.
The Rosie Project is a lighthearted romp through the process of falling in love, one that proves - yet again - that no matter how smart you are, no analysis and research is going to explain the process by which human beings decide whom to love.
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