In the following essay, Mullan discusses the plainness of the narrator's prose in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Many readers will have their experience of Mark Haddon's novel shaped by a technical peculiarity of which they might not be conscious. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time uses a sans serif font: that is, a simple kind of print in which letters lack the little tails and plinths that printers call serifs. This is highly unusual in any published book; the conventional wisdom is that serifs help the brain's visual apparatus as a line of print is scanned. The tiny thickenings and thinnings of the limbs of every letter give the eye something to catch on to. Sans serif fonts may be used in advertisements, headlines and the like, but their simplicity is almost physically uncomfortable in any lengthy text.

The...