Flowers for Algernon

By: Daniel Keyes / Narrated By: Jeff Woodman

Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins

After reading this aaaaages ago (And being heartbroken by it!), here we are: Ready to give it a Listen for the first time…

I was just a wee bit o’ a kidlet when I wandered in and my mom was watching “Charly” on TV. Nope, thought I, and I wandered out.

But then I got older, and then Big Sis read a book at school called Flowers for Algernon, and it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t stop talking about it as it just looked like she was walking around, slugged in the gut. Yep, I thought, and I picked up the slim paperback of it.

Slugged in the gut…

So when I got the audiobook suuuuper cheap after buying the (Suuuuper cheap Kindle ebook), I was excited. -BUT- I was hesitant to listen to it. After all, the truly wonderful thing is just how much, how very much, can be conveyed through the written form. After all, it’s told as progress reports that start when Charlie Gordon, an adult man with an IQ around 68, is being considered for experimental surgery. His fairly low intellect, but his absoLUTE determination and motivation, make him stand out as a candidate. The scientists have used this surgery on lab mouse Algernon, and it worked, elevating Algernon’s mental and problem solving abilities to genius level. It works; they’re looking for a human subject; and all Charlie Gordon has EVER wanted to be is smart.

Here’s where the written form comes in: Charlie begins his “progris riports”, and it’s readily apparent that learning comes with only the greatest of difficulty. No punctuation, vast misspellings—all right there on the page. So right from the get-go the listener truuuuly has to rely on narrator Jeff Woodman to relay the lack of intellect, the flawed education, all whilst tiptoeing a tightrope between doing that and NOT turning Charlie, our hero, into a stereotype who might offend listeners. Does Woodman manage it, and does the book come out as good an audiobook as it does in print?

Yesssss…! It DOES.

We are not privy, of course, to the misspellings, but Woodman introduces us to Charlie and makes him lovable. Charlie has worked sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, running deliveries at times, at a bakery for years now, all instead of being institutionalized. He enjoys the friendship of the others who work at the bakery, and he goes to a class with other challenged adults, hoping that some of the teaching will stick.

He reeeeealllly WANTS oh so desperately to be picked.

And he is.

Tho’ not immediately apparent, and tho’ he has to be given tapes to play overnight (Not understanding how to adjust the volume so that he might sleep), he slooowly, then quickly starts to display problem-solving skills, enough to be spared the shocks that he’s received in the past when “running” mazes with Algernon. Soon, his intelligence is through the roof, and soon he begins feeling nothing but contempt when he realizes that individuals he once thought of as “smart” actually have only a narrow scope of education/specialty.

Complicating all these things imMENsely, is the realization that those he’d thought were friends have actually been laughing at him, grossly mistreating him. Painful childhood memories of a mother who WOULD make him smart, of whipping him when he was fearful and soiled himself, of a sister who scorned him, of a father who, however feebly, at least attempted to spare this son of his some of his mother’s wrath, start coming into his consciousness.

Charlie’s intellectual development has soared; his emotional maturity? He’s struggling mightily.

Worse? He sees, and hates, that he’s just a lab mouse to the (InCREDibly human) scientists. And even worse? Algernon begins to show signs of mental instability and cognitive decline.

Woodman narrates this all very well -but- when Charlie shouts and sneers his rage and contempt? Woodman does so as well, to the point where, tho’ I felt for Charlie’s confusion, I reeeeally wanted to throttle him, and I did indeed lose sympathy for him during this that the other of his many rages. But Woodman had other characters to convey also, and he did them just as well. Whether it was Alice in all her kind gentleness, her confusion, her anger, or her incredible love for Charlie, or it was Dr. Nemur telling a convention of like-minded scientists that Charlie pretty much didn’t exist until the operation, Woodman manages all of them and adds much to the story. EsPECially, once again, as he had to give the listener the absolute feeling that author Daniel Keyes was going for with his eye on how Charlie’s character and intelligence/education were conveyed through the written/printed word. So tho’ I did wanna pop Charlie upside the head when he actively abused and caused emotional damage, at no point did Woodman lose me, lose my attention.

All said and done? Keyes wrote a story that, tho’ printed in novel length in 1966, manages to stay aCUTEly, PAINfully emotionally evocative and current. One need only look to nonfiction books like The Boys in the Bunkhouse to see that society’s treatment of mentally disabled individuals can still be horrific and dismissive of their basic humanity.

Basic humanity here? Seen. A gut-wrenching ending that somehow, some way, manages to be uplifting and ultimately redemptive as well? Felt.

Flowers on the grave of Algernon?

Oh dude! wept over, for sure…