In Praise of the Untrustworthy

I drive up to Canada every month to visit my father. Every now and then, my daughters (one a tween, the other a teen) come along for the ride. So the deal is that part of the way I endure, or secretly get into, Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne and Ke$ha, and then they listen to a book or two on tape (it’s a loooong drive). Fortunately, we are well past the throw-away-your-talents-and-live-like-a-martyr books of early childhood (eg., The Rainbow Fish, The Giving Tree and so many others), so we can listen to something murderous – that is, decent.

They loved Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express on an earlier trip, so I found a copy of her Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Now for those who don’t know the latter, Ackroyd basically launched Agatha’s career through its stunning use of a literary device known as the unreliable narrator. The tale’s narrator, we learn at the very end (spoiler alert), a heretofore genteel, urbane doctor, is in fact the murderer.

Upon that revelation, the car fell silent for a long moment. The girls were dumbfounded. Not by the surprise – they consume lots of books and movies with rabbit-out-of-the-hat twists – but by the whole concept of not being able to trust the person telling the tale. “But, Daddy, he can’t be the one!” “What about when he said this?”, etc. etc. I sometimes wish readers of non-fiction would realize that the voice behind the story cannot, by definition (ie, as a human being), be entirely reliable, but I always assumed that adult readers of fiction would realize that unreliability was a narrative device in good standing.

Until, that is, a very good friend, Eli Gottlieb, published a very good novel recently, Now You See Him. I won’t do a spoiler here, but his story of a murder-suicide is an unreliable narrator tale par excellence. Yet in all the reviews he e-mailed me (yes, we do that), no mention was made of this, as if the reviewers were almost as innocent as my daughters. They talked blandly of the protagonist’s relationship with women, his marriage, his male friendships, the surprise ending… but no one seemed to pick up on the central pivot of the book’s plot, and outlook. Its essence.

It was a curious omission, for the unreliable narrator is no mere literary parlor trick – it’s much more than that. It is something we all understand, or we all have to understand, if ever we want to grow up. To return to my car ride: it is only when we understand that our parents are unreliable narrators, that their version of reality is not ours, or no longer suffices to explain and order things… it is only then that we become adults. It is such a fundamental realization in everyone’s personal itinerary, as fundamental as realizing that there is sexual differentiation, that I, for one, am hard-pressed to explain why so many reviewers of my friend’s novel failed to note his unreliable narrator even in passing. I haven’t googled Ackroyd’s reviews, but I would bet that in the 1920s there would have been a greater realization of this.

Is America infantile? I don’t think so. And yet…