‘neurodivergence’: the ultimate luxury concept
thoughts on Brian and brains and art as a panacea for loneliness
I recently finished Brian, a slender and subtly moving novel by Jeremy Cooper which follows the adult life story of its titular protagonist, a chronically solitary Londoner who finds his place in the world by becoming an amateur film buff.
Brian’s painstaking routine keeps him steady, staving off the crippling anxiety that threatens to engulf him at every turn. Not just an introvert, Brian is friendless by choice and contentedly estranged from his family. He has a dull, stable job at Camden Council, a small rental flat above a shop and no serious interests. He longs for something but doesn’t know what it is — only what it isn’t, which is almost everything.
The novel opens with Brian’s random-but-life-altering decision to see a spaghetti Western one night at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank. After several months of careful contemplation, he hesitantly becomes a BFI member and after that begins attending films regularly. First biweekly then every night, then twice a night, eventually being absorbed into a small eccentric community of die hard ‘buffs,’ all of them taciturn male misanthropes like him.
Over the next several decades, Brian watches thousands of movies — from big box office hits to classics to obscure Japanese art films and we, the reader, experience the cascading litany of cinema through Brian’s awe-struck and increasingly critically-adept eyes. He goes to work and goes home, eats the same lunch everyday at the same Italian and eventually retires with only one incident: in late middle age Brian is knocked over by a scooter at a zebra crossing and ends up in hospital. Apart from this single dramatic event precious little happens. But Brian, like the novel itself, isn’t remotely as dull as he seems on the surface. His relentless single-mindedness is mesmerising, almost hypnotic at first. In the cinema he becomes a borehole of hyper focus, while outside he’s agitated, a muddle of overwhelm. The result is one of those rare novels that, like the work of Anita Brooker or Penelope Fitzgerald, manages to be about nothing and everything all at once.
Apart from the obvious — cinema, fanship, loneliness, community, masculinity — Brian is a book about psychological isolation and the struggle for connection. First and foremost Brian encounters the world very differently to all of the other humans around him. This is true of all of us but more painfully true for him. In spite of this, he manages to overcome his debilitating hyper-vigilance and shyness and live a rich and adventurous existence through a likeminded community with a shared appreciation for film. He is, in a sense, the ideal audience member, a voracious and captive autodidact — like a modern, urban Brontë sister educating herself in an isolated Yorkshire vicarage.
Reading Brian’s fictional life story, one can’t help be aware of the fact that had he been born a few decades later he’d undoubtedly have been identified as being on the autism-ADHD brain-disorder spectrum (hence the anagram of the eponymous title).
Jeremy Cooper, to his credit, resists pathologising Brian’s difference, focusing not on the trauma-narrative behind Brian’s unusual thinking but instead on the cure: the beauty and nuance of cinema. Slowly it dawns on us that had Brian been labelled “neurodiverse,” his life probably would have taken a very different course, one that may never have allowed him to discover, entirely by accident, his life’s purpose as a cinephile. This, like so much else in the book, is worth considering, especially in the context of the current conversation around “neurodivergence.”