Notes to my Biographer: Review

I greatly enjoyed Adam Haslett's "Notes to my Biographer". The narrator in this fictional story is so engaging in that he truly believes that everyone one around him is wrong and crazy, and he is the only one who has everything together. The reader is able to see, however, that he has many issues that make him less than normal. The story starts out with the narrator, an older man, explaining how he stole his niece's SAAB, and isn't sure yet if he'll return it at some point. What makes this character so interesting is how he states certain things that shock the reader so matter-of-factly. He visits his gay son and claims to the reader, "Nonetheless, I am briefly shocked by the idea that my twenty-nine-year-old boy has never seen fit to share with me the fact that he is a fruitcake—no malice intended—and I resolve right away to talk to him about it when I see him." Haslett's story is riddled with this type of irony--just by this one sentence, the reader can understand exactly why the man's son hasn't shared his sexual orientation with him. Haslett also engages his reader in the emotions that are present. While the reader wants to dislike the marrator, the end of the story produces a sense of sadness and sympathy for the old man. I got the impression that part of his ironic character was due to the fact that he had to convince himself that he truly was a good person and a good father, even though deep down, he may have known that the accusations made against him were quite true.