The Test

by Dorothy Bryant

From American Book Award-winner Dorothy Bryant, comes this timeless story about caring for an aging parent. With complexity, bravery, and dry humor, The Test details the frustrating push and pull between Pat and her eighty-year-old father, who is attempting—for the third and last time—to pass the test to renew his driver's license. Bryant's unflinching gaze sees deep into the hearts of both parent and child, revealing the dramatic, awkward, and universal struggle each faces with aging, memory, and love. Trying to reconstruct memories of her childhood and of who her parents once were, Pat puzzles out the confabulations of family how stories become accepted fact, how facts get twisted in stories, and how some perspectives are lost completely. In a deeply sensitive examination of one woman's coping with the changes of aging, Bryant offers a rare and moving testimony.

Genres: Fiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Dorothy Bryant was born in San Francisco in 1930, second daughter of Joe and Giuditta Calvetti, both born in Balangero, a factory town near Turin, Italy, and brought to the United States as children. Bryant became the first in her family to graduate from college, and she earned her living teaching (high school and college) until 1976. She began writing in 1960 and has since published a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction. Her plays have been performed in the Bay Area and beyond.

Bryant is known for her mystical, feminist and fantastic novels and plays that traverse the space between the real world and her character's inner psyche or soul. Her book The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You was described by Alice Walker as "One of my favorite books in all the world".

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember reading this years ago. I am now bringing this review to Goodreads.

Premise: An old man fights to keep his driver's license well past the point at which he has become a menace on the road.

Interestingly enough, the author had shared that this story came to her, as she was fighting with her own father to try and keep him from wanting to continue to drive.

Even as I write this review, I am reminded of the day when I had to talk my mother out of driving when it became clear that her dementia was overcoming her objective sense of reality.

Even as I share this memory, and I am consumed with the sadness of her declining self at that time, this book, as the author had intended it, was filled with joyful humor. And I can smile at that.

Bryant said, "looking back from two decades' distance, some of the scenes in this book seem so absurd that 'The Test' may be, in a dark way, my funniest book."

I would have to agree.

[Iva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This can be read in one setting, though it isn't really a novella. Beautifully descriptive and deeply felt, Bryant makes this novel more of a memoir in the reflective telling of her Italian immigrant parents' life. However, the focus is on her father's aging process as he attempts to get his driver's license renewed. And what a deeply observed process it is as he is difficult, stubborn, but sympathetic as well. In the background is her son and his partner with AIDS, her own position in the family as a divorcee, and of course, a younger woman who wants "to take him to Reno" and marry him. Also it is a portrait of California in the early 90's. Very impressive; the author should be better known.

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a slim book that tells a simple story with great intensity and insight. The book concerns a daughter and her aging father, who is at times exasperating, infuriating and manipulative. He does not want to give up his driver’s license although he is a danger to himself and others. For anyone who has a aged parent, this book is devastating in its truth.

[Mamuska · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel describes beautifully the emotions and frustrations of witnessing the aging of our parents.

[Debi Cates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pat begins her day with a phone call from her eighty year old father asking when she is coming over to take him to his driver's license test. He calls before 9, the test is at 4, and all day he asks her what time is it and what time is the test. He's failed it three times already and this is his last chance appeal.

Told in first person, present-tense Pat spends the day observing her father, wrangling his decisions large and small, thinking of her deceased mother, and trying to figure out the real story of the life of her family, "What Really Happened" she calls it. There's no big revelation. She's just trying, like so many of us, to figure out a parent who has now become a lot of work and who was never someone she liked a lot or understood very well to begin with.

Nothing like The Kin Of Atta Are Waiting for You. Felt like it was a memoir.

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly frustrating. and brilliant.