BOOKS: ‘Parallel Play’

PARALLEL PLAY: GROWING UP WITH UNDIAGNOSED ASPERGER’S
By Tim Page
Doubleday, $26, 197 pages
REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

The quintessentially irreverent John Waters, Baltimore’s cinematic sage, attempts to nail this book in one sentence: “Tim Page’s witty, intellectually stimulating memoir almost made me wish I had Asperger’s Syndrome.” While I agree with the witty and intellectually stimulating part, after reading what Mr. Page had to endure because of this relatively little-known disease, I can’t get even close to “almost.”

Born in California (in 1941) and raised in Connecticut, Mr. Page went on to become a respected music critic (The New York Times, Newsday and The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer), but it was a rough road made rougher by the fact that until he was 45, he didn’t know what was wrong with him.

In a 1944 article, Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychiatrist, described the disorder, which was then given his name. According to Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, it is “a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social and occupational skills, by normal language and cognitive development, and by restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities often with above average performance in a narrow field against a general background of deficient functioning. ”

That’s young Tim Page all right. When his second grade teacher asked the class to write about a recent field trip, Mr. Page’s report was so far off point that it earned him an angrily-scrawled “See me!” in red. After writing that the teacher in question “never liked me much,” he admits, in reference to his literary effort, ” as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things.

“I received a grade of ’Unsatisfactory’ in Social Development from the Mansfield [Connecticut] Public Schools that year. … About the only positive assessment was that I worked well independently. Of course. Then as now, it was all that I could do.”

Mr. Page quotes from a book written to help parents of “Aspies”: “The person with Asperger’s Syndrome has no distinguishing physical features but is primarily viewed by other people as different because of their unusual quality of social behavior and conversation skills. For example, a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome described how as a child she saw people moving into a house up the street, ran up to one of the new kids, and, instead of the conventional greeting and request of ’Hi, you want to play?,’ proclaimed ’Nine times nine is equal to 81.’”

Early on, because his “memory was so acute and my wit so bleak” people began calling him a genius. But a genius at what, he wondered. Later, when he was given praise, usually grudgingly, for being able to “think outside the box,” he didn’t see that as a compliment because he couldn’t see why other people found the boxes so important, or important at all, nor could he figure out how to live safely in or out of them. In 1994, he wrote, “My efforts have only partly succeeded; at the age of fifty-three, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.”

When Mr. Page was 13, he received his first 15 minutes of fame as the subject of a short documentary called “A Day With Timmy Page” that chronicled the youth’s already formidable knowledge of music and his own filmmaking, with a Kodak 8 mm camera.

The boy’s early facility with language and numbers was soon matched by an almost instinctual ability to play, and compose for, the piano, and he soon knew more about music, especially opera, and movies, especially silent-era films, than most adults. Those are not, however, achievements that his peers ranked anywhere near as high as being good at sports, which Tim Page most definitely was not.

“Anything related to the human body, especially mine, seemed to me bad news, with physical education at the top of the page. Once or twice a week, I would be herded out to play kickball; teams were chosen, and I was embedded among the strongest kids, to provide some chance of equal battle. In memory, the game is forever bases loaded with two outs when my turn at the plate comes, and I am as well suited as a giraffe to meet the big red ball that comes at me with frightening speed.”

As the ball approaches, Mr. Page’s teammates, normally his tormentors, cheer for him, but when, predictably, he again mis-kicks the ball, they resume their bullying, and he is, as he puts it, “a freak once more.”

“’So?’ I wanted to scream. ’There are things that I know; things that I can do. Can you name the duet from La Boheme that Antonio Scotti and Geraldine Farrar recorded in Camden, New Jersey, on October 6, 1909? What was the New York address of D.W. Griffith’s first studio? How many books by David Graham Phillips have you read? Who was Adelaide Crapsey? I learned to play Chopin’s entire Prelude in E Minor in a single night!’ And then tears, of course, so the taunts redoubled.”

In some ways, Mr. Page’s life got a bit easier as a teenager and young adult, because he was not always the only freak in town, and definitely not when he moved to New York City, though most of the book is set in Storrs, Conn. But even though his off-the-charts IQ and his love for and knowledge of music finally set him on the path that led to the current high regard in which he is held by readers, performers and students (Mr. Page is a professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California), his life was never what anyone would call easy.

Plagued by depression and panic attacks, both conditions made worse by excessive drinking and smoking, at 31 Mr. Page discovered meditation, which may well have saved him, seeing as “In the three and a half decades since, I have missed only a few days of meditation.” In Manhattan, he met a mentor who arranged for him to attend the Mannes College of Music, a school he’d never heard of but which he quickly grew to love. And when, unable not to, he began to write about music, the die was cast and Mr. Page’s present and future began to brighten, somewhat.

In 2000, again plagued by depression, he decided to go back into therapy, which did not help until two years later when he saw a New York psychologist who diagnosed his Asperger’s Syndrome. So, a happy ending? Of course not, but then not a terribly unhappy one either.

Tim Page ends his fine book by counting a number of his blessings, and then writes, “And if I am still something of a stranger in this world, a predestined outsider, I remain profoundly grateful for my life and its fitful and mysterious spells of invisible joy.”

• John Greenya is a Washington-area writer.