"Shtum" By Jem Lester Overlook. 320 pp. $26.95 To write a novel about someone who has severe autism is to grapple with a paradox. After all, severe autism repels language, turns it chaotic or, in the case of autistic mutism, simply absorbs it wholesale, as a black hole does light. This hasn't, of course, kept fiction writers from regularly using autistic and developmentally disabled narrators and protagonists in their work. In "Shtum," a [...]
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