by JULIET WATERS

Mark Haddon’s international bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was told from the point of view of a young boy with Asperger’s syndrome. The central hero of his most recent novel, A Spot of Bother, is a 57-year-old man grappling with anxiety attacks brought on by what he suspects might be skin cancer. From the dustcover, Mark Haddon looks more like a shy rugby player hitting the prime of his career than an autistic boy, a recently retired maker of playground equipment or an important novelist.

But no writer builds fiction entirely from imagination. As Haddon put it in a recent interview, “Show me the artist anywhere who’s had an utterly stable mental life and I’ll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.” This quip says a lot about Haddon and his writing. Not just that he’s had his own struggles with sanity, but that his instinct is to offer people the ordinary comforts that keep sanity intact. Whether it’s regular hot dinners for life or dependably great novels.

A Spot of Bother is not as effortless and hypnotic a read as The Curious Incident. Its characters are too much like members of the average family, and irritating in the same way that the average family usually is. George Hall, our hero, is in many ways your average, middle-class dad. When he finds out Jamie, his only son, is gay and in love, he considers what it is that really bothers him. “He didn’t have a problem with homosexuality per se... It was the thought of men purchasing furniture together which disturbed him. Men snuggling. More disconcerting, somehow, than shenanigans in public toilets.”

Then again, the manly man does not seem to be much of a comfort to George either. He is equally dismayed by the news that his daughter, Katie, a single mother who’s been struggling to make a decent life for herself and her five-year-old son, is marrying a man who is not her intellectual or social equal.

George’s wife, Jean, and Jamie—who is no poster child for emotional honesty or egalitarian tolerance himself—are equally disturbed by Katie’s boyfriend. Ray is a beefy, working-class success story.

“He looked like an ordinary person who had been magnified. He moved more slowly than other people, the way the larger animals in zoos did. Giraffes. Buffalo. He lowered his head to go through doorways and had what Jamie unkindly but accurately described as ‘strangler’s hands.’” Katie on the other hand is quick-witted and speaks French. Her parents and her brother suspect she could do better, but that she’s too stubborn to admit she’s marrying a man simply because he has “a good salary and a thick skin.”

Katie, however, is the kind of woman who does not take well to unsolicited advice. She’s smart, but too comfortable expressing her often-selfish opinions. Despite the difficulties of her life recently, she’s spoilt, increasingly shrewish and needs a man with especially thick skin. Of course she’s had that, whether she knows it or not, with George, who in all his paranoia about melanoma has failed to notice Jean is having an affair.

While some critics have panned this book as too ordinary a follow-up to The Curious Incident, the truth is that making literary magic out of a young boy who finds human emotion an impenetrable mystery seems like nothing compared with the challenge of making magic out of the emotional incompetence of your typically numb middle-class family.

To reveal more about how A Spot of Bother does this would spoil the delicate balance of expected and unexpected storylines. But Haddon proves once again to have perfect pitch when it comes to portraying emotional vulnerability. His novels are testaments to what a curious and mysterious gift this is.

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon. Doubleday, hc, 354pp, $32.95