“Driving Mr. Albert” is the story of a disillusioned writer and an octogenarian ex-pathologist who drive across America with Einstein’s brain.This has to be interesting. We’ll meet a stoned William S. Burroughs,discover surprising facts about the life of Einstein, and be disgusted by the lawyer whose job it is to profit from the public images of the dead by preventing others from profiting inappropriately from the same. As the Washington Post Book World stated on the front cover, a story like that just has to be, “Eccentric, implausible, hilarious, infuriating, and ultimately mesmerizing.”
The defining characteristic of a true story, though, is its truth. And in reality, a road trip across America includes days just watching the endless abyss of middle America from a freeway. The author attempts to romanticize this experience with the kinds of descriptive sentences that grade 7 English teachers love to use as examples of good writing. But that doesn’t help the truth. The truth is that it took Michael Paterniti eight days to cross the country, and he succeeded in making me believe that I was there for each and every minute. Since the eight days I experienced represented only two days of actual reading, I was also blessed with a special derstanding of the theory of relativity, which Einstein summarized by saying, “An hour sitting on a park bench with a pretty girl can pass like a minute. A minute sitting on a hot stove can feel like an hour.” An hour reading about an old man driving can feel like days.
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