Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Mary Gordon raises obfuscation to a high art in this sophomoric, self-pitying, excuse for what actually appears to be an exercize in memory retrieval for the emotionally challenged. The title of the book is quite appropriate. Angela's Ashes, in contrast, which is a memoir about the life and times of the author is a lush journey through dark and passionate times. While his life could be construed as pitiful he does not beg for pity. He has painted a portrait as vivid as any I've seen and thus made the memoir he wrote as memorable as any I will probably ever read.

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.

Mary Gordon fails at making her readers sympathetic to her self-proclaimed traumas. Yes, she does raise the questions of the validity of memory. But she does so only to justify her own existence. She needs to ground her irrational love for her father, which at times verges on the Electra Complex. She paints the picture of a man who, a Jew himself, was a rabid anti-Semite. Who, a converted Catholic, published a soft-porn magazine. Who lied about not having a family, when the one he did have disowned him, and about attending Harvard and Oxford, while he never even finished high school. Who said he was born in the States, while he came from Eastern Europe. I understand what Gordon attempted to accomplish - she tried to show that despite all this, she is capable of loving her father unconditionally. But she fails. Her suffering and mourning are artificial, pompous, and almost pathetic. Gordon's intellectual snobism is something of which many (all?) of us are guilty, but her expressions of it are exaggerated and too blatant to be accepted. She does not fail to mention that she could stay with "Toni Morrison's friends" on a research trip. Or that she has tenure at Columbia, or that she publishes frequently (and the biggest names in the business, of course, adore her work), or that she is an insider in the New York intelligensia circles. She has tied herself so closely to her father that those statements make me wonder is she is trying to atone for his lack of education, sophistication, and morality. The only redeeming chapter in the book is the one in which Gordon describes her mother, now an old woman bound to a wheelchair in a nursing home. Instead of musing over the supposed complexities of her feelings toward her father, Gordon should devote more time to making the reality of her mother a happier one.

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.

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.

This book tells the story of Mary Gordon's search to find out about her father who died when she was a little girl. She skillfully weaves together the two aspects of her search. One part of her quest involves researching documents to try to piece together the facts of his life. She finds some things that she would rather not have known, such as his anti-Semitic writings and the fact that he published a pornographic magazine. Then, as she delves into his family history, she is able to understand even these parts of his life.

The other part of her search involves the scrutiny of her childhood memories to try to reconcile the man she remembers with the man she has found in her research. This aspect of the book really touched me because Gordon was able to capture so well the essence of childhood memories. She speaks of the difference in how her father looked to her as a child (dashing and handsome) and the man in the photographs she has from that time (a man who refused to wear his dentures and bought his shoes several sizes too large.) Finally she is able to combine the man from her research with the man from her memory to form a loving and sympathetic picture of her father.

At the end of the book, Gordon writes eloquently of her feelings for her mother. She tells of her mother's deteriorating health and how she has live in a nursing home. She also speaks of the contrast between her aged mother suffering from severe memory loss and her father who is forever young in her mind. She admits that she often wishes her mother's life were over while at the same time she has wished all her life that her father was alive again. Gordon portrays so dramatically this contrast between the aged dependent mother who is living without memories of the past, and the young energetic father who lives only in his daughter's memory.

In the end, she is able to give her father one final gift--a gift which requires a great deal of courage on her part.

Mary Gordon has a rare talent--she is able to remember exactly what it feels like to be a child. She expresses in this book things that I have felt but could never have put into words. It has been a long time since a book has touched me the way this one did

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

I've read all Mary Gordon's fiction work. I picked this up after a few years on my get this when it's in paperback list. As someone who lost her father as a young child, I found it fascinating how Mary was able to find out so much about her father. And couldn't we all do better knowing our parents this well even in life?! It was a wonderful to find out about his life, even though she she didn't like all she found. Yes there are some slow, almost tedious sections when she writes about his writing. But how she comes to grips with all of the secrets and history and still has unconditional love for him makes me feel better about this world. What a lesson she has passed to her children, and her lucky readers.

I didn't think this book would ever end! The author goes on and on lamenting how her father "lied" to her about his past and then describes how wonderful and loving he was while alive. Perhaps, he wanted her to believe he was the best in everything so he elaborated. For heavens sake, she was only seven when he died and parents don't tell all to young children. This doesn't change what he was to her, however. He gave her so much love and attention in the few short years he had with her and, along with her mother and other relatives, helped to make her what she is today. I just found this author to wallow in self-pity and hurt, the complete opposite of Frank McCourt. When the author wrote that she knew the suffering of prisoners and slaves because she had heard her father groan was the height of self-grandisement. Or when she wrote her daughter was at home "in America because I married her father whose ancestors have been in Appalachia mountains for 2! 00 years"(p. 113) is a slap to all those first generation immigrants who come to America to better themselves and, in turn, do indeed feel American. So what if her father was not born in the United States. Neither was mine, but both he and I feel just as American as those with ancestors who came over 200 years ago. The bottom line is that all of us came over, whether by boat or the land bridge that existed thousands of years ago. Ms. Gordon, get over it and move on with your life!

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.