The Rosie Project
February 2013
Graeme Simsion / Text Publishing
Graeme Simsion’s debut, The Rosie Project, is a crowd-pleasing, very funny rom-com. Its narrator, Don Tillman, a professor of genetics who sits somewhere on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, is looking for a wife. He treats the mission the way he does every other area of his life. Nothing that can’t be sorted without a good ‘objective’ research instrument. But his questionnaire is so prescriptive (‘Do you eat kidney?’ has only one correct answer: ‘occasionally’) that he’s bound to fail. Enter Rosie Jarman, a psychology PhD student looking for the DNA of her real father. Rosie and Tillman are so incompatible – she smokes and is never on time – that, in true screwball spirit, they are bound to fall in love. If only Tillman could understand how that worked.
Tillman is blameless and endearing in his C3P0-like buffoonery. But at times it becomes clear that his comedy is a conscious exaggeration of his profound inability to read emotions. It is how he has survived. The romantic heart of the novel is in knowing this, and in knowing that love is still possible.
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