We've all met someone like Wilberforce, the irresistibly strange narrator of "Bordeaux: A Novel in Four Vintages" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 308 pages, $24). He's a mild-mannered man who says all the right things, yet is oddly flat of aspect. Not quite autistic, but off, somehow.
"I don't know what it is, but something's missing in you," his business partner tells him. "You're not normal."
It's hard to tell just how abnormal Wilberforce is, because when we meet him, he's only 37 but already profoundly alcoholic -- by all accounts but his own. When a doctor tells him he's suffering from Korsakoff's psychosis, a brain disorder that confuses real memories with invented ones, he insists in his precise, labyrinthine way that he's just a misunderstood oenophile. Of the doctor, he says: "Referring to wine as 'alcohol' was so insensitive and crass I could only imagine he did it to annoy me."
He's losing it, but before he does, he takes us back in time, recounting his childhood with chilly adoptive parents, his lonely success in business, his meet-up with a group of wine lovers who become his first friends, his marriage to the lovely Catherine (whom he steals from one of those friends), her gradual disillusionment with him and her death in a car accident.
His monotone is pitch-perfect and weirdly fascinating, and because we know Wilberforce can't tell his memories from his illusions, we're not sure what to believe. But in a manner that brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro's masterful 1989 novel "The Remains of the Day," we figure out quite a lot simply from what people say to our unreliable narrator.
We understand why Catherine tells him: "With you, it's like living with someone who's dead but doesn't know it. ... You've no idea how to be a human being at all, have you? ... I'm not even sure what species you are."
But when a social worker says, more kindly, "What I have observed in you is a great ability to mask your feelings," we nod, too, for Wilberforce is clearly in there somewhere, a damaged and hurting soul. Though he's a man of still waters, it's always as if some great fish is lurking just beneath the surface, ready to burst forth.
He's also unwittingly funny, partly because he's so clueless about the things he describes. "I knew how to talk to people, but never to the point of doing it for fun," he says, and then is surprised when he finds he really is having fun with his new friends, a feeling he examines with cool interest, as if he were Mr. Spock deconstructing one of Dr. McCoy's wisecracks.
