The Blindfold Test by Barry Schechter

The Moment: Your plans go to shit. Again.

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Jun 10, 2009

The Blindfold Test
by Barry Schechter

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There is going to be a moment this summer — after your flight gets delayed for the third time on a cloudless day, after another bout of food poisoning from a sketchy all-you-can-eat Maryland shore crab joint, after the Phillies blow a thin lead over the Mets — where you become convinced that some kind of plot exists to destroy all the simple pleasures of the summer, leaving you sunburnt, exhausted and fed up. Jeffrey Parker, the soft creme center of Barry Schechter's confectionery The Blindfold Test, lives in this moment.

Parker's life isn't a complete disaster. With a steady low-rent community-college job, a mildly depressing but comfortable apartment, and an affectionate out-of-his-league ex, he's more a slacker sad sack than a walking catastrophe. He's just a sad sack with enemies.

But those enemies — powerful, shadowy, well-funded and capricious — have done too good a job. Parker's luck has been so bad for so long that he's stopped noticing setbacks, and The Blindfold Testlays out the escalation in torment that Parker's adversaries mount. Schechter orchestrates the downward spiral tidily, from merely irritating (some precisely calibrated TV interference) to life-threatening (impromptu brawls, guns real and otherwise, inarticulately angry mobs).

The slapstick comedy Parker is subjected to, though, never entirely drowns out an undercurrent of hard-won paranoia. And the best thing that Schechter does, the thing that earns his book a deserved double take, happens when you hear the conspiratorial whispers yourself. Right before the subway stops mid-tunnel again.

Melville House, 272 pp., $16.95, June 2

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