[In the following review, Maitland offers negative assessment of The Shadow Man.]

Mary Gordon has a well established record as a novelist deeply shaped by, although rather at odds with, her Roman Catholicism. I admire her work, and particularly Final Payments. So I came to this autobiographical memoir with some enthusiasm, though also with some doubts, as I have difficulties with books in the confessional genre by novelists. However, even uneasy amalgams can be interesting, and I was interested.

I was also feeling indirectly involved. Gordon writes of the death of her father when she was seven as the most important event of her life. My brother died last year leaving two small children, the older of whom is just seven. My family has talked a great deal about how one supports the children in preserving useful memories of their father, so I was open to a deeper understanding of loss and the way death complicates memory, knowledge, anger, and love.

I have spelled my position out in more detail than I might normally do, because I want to be fair to Gordon, but I have to say that The Shadow Man is quite simply a bad book. Nearly forty years after he died Gordon set out “in search” of her lost father, and the book is a record of the search. It ends up being more about Gordon's sensitivities than a biography of another person, but she was laboring under a particular difficulty—everything that she found out is pretty nasty. Her father was a liar （in large and small）, a pornographer, a Jewish anti-Semite, a crypto-Nazi, and a grossly irresponsible husband.

It must be hard to discover all that about one's beloved father; and it was made more difficult still for Gordon because at the same time she was turning her attention to the task, her mother was collapsing into Alzheimer's disease, unable to offer more domestic balancing memories to her daughter. But “hard” is not, from the reader's point of view, enough of an excuse. I hope that were I to start out on such a project and found what Gordon found, I would sensibly abandon it, or fictionalize it, or not publish it. Instead the whole thing seems to have rotted Gordon's writerly intelligence （which she certainly has）. The book is not simply ill-conceived, it is badly structured, sloppily written, and deplorably self-indulgent.

The best example of these qualities is the bizarre stylistic flourishes that adorn the book: I cannot find a single page which is not littered with preposterous rhetorical questions. Here is Gordon on the subject of her father's false teeth:

But were the teeth his? Yes, of course, since he had bought them. Did he pay for them, or did my mother, or some anonymous benefactor with a taste for Orthodox Catholicism, literature with a fascist bite? But the teeth weren't his in that they didn't emanate from his body. They weren't flesh of his flesh as I was. So it is possible to say that I was his daughter but they were not his teeth. Then whose teeth were they?

This self-dramatizing quality might be justified in relation to her memories, but it continues into the period of her “search,” all of which is unfortunately written in the present tense—giving a gushing flow, but undercutting any self-critical possibility.

But I went to a place where I was not the only one ＼the public archives office］ … who are all these people and how could I be one of them? What are they looking for? What is the evidence they need? Are they trying to find lost kin. … Or maybe someone with money, the money that can change their lives?

At the root of the book's failure is the fact that I simply cannot believe in the seven-year-old self whom Gordon remembers and describes—a seven-year-old whose beloved father has just died and who lies in bed and thinks

I had to allow for the possibility that I might be only an idea—but in the mind of whom? Or what? Not God certainly. I knew it wasn't God; at that moment God was only one more instance of failed language.

（I don't think so. And this from the creator of the young girl in The Company of Women—we know Gordon knows better.）

Because she does not give us a credible child it is increasingly hard to believe in the sincerity, or even emotional capability, of the grown woman who is now the narrator. This is a double shame because it also undermines the potentially most interesting part of the book, when she turns her attention from this maudlin drivel to an exploration of her mother, her mother's retreat into amnesia, and the struggle Gordon therefore has in establishing the possibility of exhuming her father and reburying him. It has become, regrettably, almost impossible to believe anything she says.

The difficulty is enhanced, I would have to add, by some most peculiar lapses of taste: name-dropping the fact that Toni Morrison recommended the hotel in which Gordon stayed in Lorain, or telling us that she gave her children French bread with their omelet the day of her father's reburial.

I think I feel a sincere pity for Gordon wrestling with what is obviously a devastating experience, but I feel as sorry for the reader having to read it in this form. At one point she exclaims

Am I one of those modern people who don't know the difference between the public and the private? One of those people on “Oprah” or “Geraldo,” one of those transsexual doctors or dominatrix twins who can't wait to tell their tales? Am I squandering my legacy by putting it out in the open, on the trail, where it can be consumed like Hansel and Gretel's crumbs, by passersby?

The answer is “Yes you are.”