"The Testing of Luther Albright": An unreliable, uncompelling narrator

"The Testing of Luther Albright"
by MacKenzie Bezos
Fourth Estate, 239 pp., $23.95

The unreliable narrator is one of the harder tricks to pull off well in a novel, with its constraints on the writer to convey the story by telling a subjective or incomplete version of it. In her first novel, Seattle author MacKenzie Bezos offers up Luther Albright, a middle-aged father who works so hard to avoid being like his father with his only child that he comes across as, well, somewhat like his father.

A civil engineer for the California Department of Water Resources, Albright is a bright but pedantic man, much more attracted to the details of the house he designed and built to withstand earthquakes than to emotional give-and-take with his wife and 15-year-old son, Elliot.

Elliot is assigned to research and write the biography of a relative for school, and he chooses Luther's father. With every question Elliot asks about his grandfather, Luther perceives a crucial decision about whether his coughing up an emotional reaction to his own life's experiences will help or hinder his child. Luther's feelings erupt in response to Elliot's questions; and we are meant to infer that his emotional blockages will affect everyone in his family.

In "The Testing of Luther Albright," the joyless protagonist anticipates every conversation with co-workers and even the hardware-store owner as a potential trap. Some of these exchanges are well-executed, but the insecurities of Luther Albright are neither moving nor stimulating. Just as his "issues" are given too much heft for their significance, the imagery can be heavy-handed. As Luther is about to make an imprudent comment by phone to a suspicious reporter, he is overlooking a freeway with traffic swerving to avoid a prone dog. Get it? Road kill!

Bezos is a meticulous writer, but her novel suffers from a suffocating focus on a narrator whose precise calibrations of insult and loss are, whether reliable or not, insufficiently compelling.