The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father

Author Mary Gordon's father died when she was seven years old. For a long time, this fact seemed to be a defining aspect of her life. She was happy to think of him in terms of the man who loved her "more than God" and then disappeared. But thirty years later, she begins a quest to find out who her father really was.Her search takes her to libraries, archives, and her own memory, but what she learns on this journey begins to test her credulity and her view of the man. Her many discoveries included the fact that he was actually an immigrant, rather than a man born in Ohio; he was a Jew who became an anti-Semite; he was a convert to Catholicism who wrote devout Catholic poetry; he was also a publisher of pornography.In Ohio, where he grew up, she can find nobody who remembers him, or those who think they do, but have negative reactions to him. She discovers many facts that led to her realization that the man she thought was her father was a fictionalized version of a man. She has to decide what to do with this conflicting information.Even her own mother is not a reliable source of memories, as she is losing hers. She scarcely can distinguish one event from another.Throughout  The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father , I felt a connection to Gordon's quest, in that we desperately need to understand who we came from in order to completely know ourselves. Those defining connections can make or break us.The first part of the story was tedious and not as interesting as the later parts. I especially enjoyed the sections that included her mother and their history together--a piece to the puzzle that completed the whole picture for me.Because I enjoy this author's work, I was curious to know more about her history. This book filled it in very well, and except for the beginning parts, portrayed a compelling family portrait. Four stars.

The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father sketches a passionate portrait of a deeply flawed man, a shabby pornographer with literary pretensions, a convert to Christianity who was so ashamed of his immigrant and Jewish origins that he hid his past and became a nasty anti-Semite and a writer of speeches for Joe McCarthy. In the course of investigating her father's life and of reflecting on the motives for her search, Mary Gordon also had her father's bones dug up and reburied. The intensity of her obsession with her father, a father who died when she was only seven, is terrifying--yet readily understandable. The father of her childhood, after all, was not a real human being. He was a fairytale father, an Angela Carter father, a "magic uncle," a Pied Piper strewing candy and trailing kids. In trying to find her "real" father, in trying to come to terms with the lies her father told her, Gordon confesses that "I have done things to my father. I have remembered him, researched him, investigated him, exposed him, invented him." The one thing she cannot do is exorcise him. Gordon is a spiritual sister to Sylvia Plath--Plath who lost her father when she was eight--and despite her ironies, her literary inventiveness, her distancing techniques, she cannot escape the curse of victimhood which her father's early death bequeathed her.Andre Gerard,Editor of Fathers: A Literary Anthology

Much as this reader enjoyed Mary Gordon's other writing, especially Final Payments, he must fault the writer for this maundering, meandering piece of work. Bloviated with rhetorical questions, she plows the same ground over and over again, bemoaning her fate, and crying out, "Why? Why?" One is tempted to respond, "Because. Because." Without the self-conscious and self-serving rhetorical questions, this book would be 1/3 shorter, and it would be improved. If you've ever fantasized about being a psychiatrist, wondering what it would be like to listen at length to someone who refuses to accept life, this book should satisfy you. For the rest of us, let's hope that Gordon finally accepts herself. Frankly, Kathryne Harrison's The Kiss was more fully honest and better written.

The story is original: a father, a convert to the author's (and her mother's) beloved, complicated-yet-simple Catholicism, who died much too soon and whose 'history' collapses, traumatically, dramatically, under even the lightest daughterly research. The poignancy is here, too, because even though he didn't go to Harvard -- or even finish high school -- the guy was a beautiful father, kind and enthusiastically nurturing to his prized, brainy and adoring only child. Her yearning for her dad is nearly overwhelming. As an adult, she mourns the loss of the lock his hair -- and other artifacts -- she had for a while, after his death. But why does Gordon refer to herself as a Jew? She is Catholic. (She merely looks more like her father than her mother.) For a purposeful Catholic writer to change religions in such a literary fashion seems manipulative and disingenuous.

Author Mary Gordon's intimate biography of her father is told as an account of the author's own adventure in researching and recalling the embarrassing facts of her father's real life. Most of the drama comes in the author's feelings of betrayal, guilt, and disillusionment, so the book functions more as an autobiography, as is emphasized by a lengthy addition describing the author's mother's life.Gordon has an engaging, lucid style, and the first half of the book has some suspense as she pores over records and searches out witnesses for the truth about her father's unusual life. But ultimately the self-pity becomes wearying, and one wishes the author could gain some perspective and be grateful for her blessings.

For a lengthy review of this book written by Marjorie Steinfels O'Brien in the prestigious magazine Commonweal, go to the magazine's archives. The review is truly sui generis !

This book is very much in the same vein as Geoffrey Wolff's Duke of Deception... a man who was a failure as a person yet a loving father. A chilling portrait of the ambivalence of knowing one's imperfect parent.