Can't Trust That Guy

I've recently come to the conclusion that I have a very shaky relationship with unreliable narrators. Seems perfectly natural, I suppose; that's what they're all about. But it seems funny to me that someone who reads as much as I do has so much trouble shifting gears to mistrusting the narrator. I guess it has to do with the fact that I read for entertainment, escape, fantasy, as opposed to the appreciation of literary style.

An excess of cleverness is one of my least favorite literary qualities. But I can't point at that problem as the issue with the unreliable narrator. I'm not sure which of these two problems turned me off of The Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England; maybe it was just my dislike for the narrator. But I was talking with someone the other day about Kazuo Ishiguro, and this got me thinking. I read When We Were Orphans a few years ago, and I really loved it until the end. As the book progressed, though, I found myself getting mad at the author for these ridiculous assumptions that everyone in the book seemed to be making. He's going to find his missing mother after 20 years, when the authorities couldn't? And the people who moved into his house 20 years ago are going to happily vacate for him, now that he's back? What kind of fool's paradise is this? I asked myself.

Someone pointed out to me, last week (which is to say, about two years after I read the novel), that the narrator is completely unreliable, and all these things are probably not happening the way he recounts them exactly. And you know, while I realized he was unreliable during the scene near the end where everything gets all trippy, I have to say it never occurred to me that he's really very unreliable all the way through the book, and that you really can't assume any of those things happened the way he related them.

I don't think I'm giving much of anything away here--any reasonably bright person would have seen that. I, apparently, don't fit that description. I think this fits in with Ishiguro's (aside: how great is his name? I love saying it.) other books, at least the ones I've read: The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. But in those, it was the emotional judgment of the narrator that you couldn't trust, not his/her recounting of the facts. Somehow this is very different to me. I understand that he has other books more like Orphans in their use of the narrator, but I haven't read them.

And this is not just an Ishiguro thing. I guess what it comes down to is that I throw myself into books in a way that makes it hard for me to judge their narrators objectively. I can do it if I'm given guidance from the author (Lolita, say), if I'm given space to step out with the author and observe the narrator. But if the author flies under the radar and leaves me in the room with a raving lunatic telling me his story, I will be nodding vigorously and scanning the skies nervously for the flying saucers full of little green men. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.