Customer Reviews

The Phantom Father: A Memoir

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Gifford's fiction is often an unholy pastiche of styles and devices, and this technique is perfectly suited for his memoir PHANTOM FATHER... I highly recommend it. Deserves a space on a short bookshelf that includes Angela's Ashes and The Liars' Club.

After reading the two fictional accounts of gangsters by Stephen Hunter, I thought I might read about a real one for a change. I bought this book primarily as the pictures showed the man as a normal human being, more resembling the government men in the old movies than a killer.

It is touted as a 'memoir' but it is merely short remembrances of the author about himself, not so much about his 'good' father. His note about the Japanese form shosetsu being described as "a piece of autobiography or a set of memoirs, somewhat embroidered and colored but essentially nonfiction."

While shosetsu contains elements of fiction, it is "a rather more flexible and generous and catholic term than 'novel'." This book belongs to this genre and should be approached as such, he writes.

Why should so-called historians get away with embroidering and elaborating on the facts and present this as nonfiction. Our local historian does just that constantly, and most folks believe that what he is writing is the truth.

This most-prolific writer does just that with his childhood remembrances. Seems to me he had a privileged and good life; maybe the father moved on to create another family, but he did not abandon or forget his firstborn son.

I just wish he had presented more of the humanness of Rudy Winston whose specialty was the liquor business (man, he would fit in here in Knoxville where the yuppie newcomers sit out on the sidewalk on Gay Street and drink hard liquor openly -- and get away with it).

He was a fine-looking man, and his son is handsome enough to be in one of those movies he has collaborated on with David Lynch.