[In the following review, Pritchard offers tempered evaluation of The Shadow Man.]

Mary Gordon's first novel, Final Payments, begins with a funeral, that of the heroine's father, whom she has cared for through 11 years and a series of strokes. The daughter's subsequent rediscovery of life. which this first-person narrative engagingly traces, concludes with a sentence predictive of Ms. Gordon's subsequent career as a writer: “There was a great deal I wanted to say.”

Now, after three further novels, a collection of stories, three novellas and a book of essays, she has written a passionate and extravagant account of coming to terms with her own father, David Gordon, who died of a heart attack when she was 7 years old. Who and what David Gordon really was is the object of his daughter's search. She begins that search knowing or believing she knows, that he was a Jew whose earlier life involved a Midwestern boyhood, years at Harvard and in France, a certain amount of journalistic and literary production, a conversion to Roman Catholicism and marriage to her mother （herself a Catholic）. But the “cave of memory” Ms. Gordon is about to enter turns out to be as she apply puts it, “a tourist trap.”

For the “facts” about David Gordon are, to say the least, misleading. In the course of her investigations—which consist in part of reading her father's works in libraries, checking his family's birth records, traveling to Lorain, Ohio, and engaging in countless conversations with those who may or may not have known him or known about him—she finds that her father was in fact born in Vilna, Lithuania, that his first name was Israel, that he was not an only child, that there was no Harvard and no Paris in his “undergraduate years” （he worked for the B & O railroad）, that he edited a mildly pornographic “humor” magazine in the 1920's, that after his conversion he became stridently anti-Semitic and right-wing, admiring radio's Father Coughlin and Cambridge's Father Feeney, that he was married once before, back in Ohio.

In the book's preface, referring to her love for this “passionate man” who once assured her that he loved her more than God, Ms. Gordon admits that “my desire not to move from that place led to a kind of memorializing that amounted to entombment.” So the book is, figuratively and literally, about the disinterring of the father, and it concludes with his reburial in a different cemetery from the one where he had reposed with his Catholic in-laws.

It's nothing less than a matter of life and death, for the stakes are mortal ones. As suggested by her witty and serious play on the themes of entombment and memorializing, Ms. Gordon's success as a writer depends on how vividly and convincingly she can bring the dead to life. She uses the word “quest” to describe her attempts to get back in memory to the place she and her father once shared. That place turns out to be elusive, indeed delusive, but “quest” accurately describes her experience as both daughter and writer. As in fairy tales and ritual magic, there are obstacles to be surmounted, reverses to be endured. The right questions must be asked, the right （or the least wrong） moves made in order for the dead “shadow man” to yield up his lineaments, thereby removing a weight from the shoulders of his living daughter.

Ms. Gordon's narrative seeks to avoid the banalities of repetitive insistence by exploiting the lively paradoxes and incongruities of her situation. If the cliché has it that the living woman seeks to find the lost father, then the notion of losing must be examined. “I am my father's daughter. I am reading what he wrote as his daughter, desperate not to lose him because of the words he sent out to strangers, to the world. But how can I fail to lose him, reading what he wrote?”

At particular issue here are sentences the father published in the early 1940's about Jews, and looking at pages of his contributions to a journal called Catholic International she finds that “what he wrote, what I have made myself read, what I have waited so long to read properly, has taken away what I used to have, my joy in being with my father, with the man who took me to the city, who bought me books, wrote me poems.” Such are the ambiguous gifts of trying to bring the father into full consciousness by somehow explaining him: “I know it's blasphemy to invent an inner life for a father, whose inner life literally produced you.” Indeed, her identity as writer is in question since, she says, she is a writer because her father was one: “I write the way I do because of the way he wrote.”

The narrative is strongest and liveliest when the daughter is able to see herself in incongruous relation to institutions and objects that are not, as she is, obsessed with a single passion. Some of the best pages of The Shadow Man are about books, about the libraries where Ms. Gordon looks up her father's writings. In Columbia's Butler Library, “temple to high Protestantism,” where she has been coming for 27 years, she locates him in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and finds an essay on an English poet by this “Ohio Jew” later turned Catholic. At Brown University's Hay Library, “a small Federal-style mansion with portraits of founders on the wall,” she finds it absurd to be asking for the archives on Hot Dog, a magazine in which her father, under the name Jack Dinnsmore, wrote things like “Are Chorus Girls on the Square?” In Lorain, Ohio, her father's hometown after he came to America at the age of 6, she arrives in an ice storm and instead of concentrating on David Gordon's early education finds herself worrying about the fine leather coat she's brought along, exactly the wrong thing to wear in such weather. Meanwhile, her hotel caters to her uneasy heart only by serving “heart easy” pasta, a food slightly less than spiritually fulfilling.

But sometimes the atmosphere feels less enlivening than oppressively up close and personal. Ms. Gordon keeps raising the ante in this game for mortal stakes, and in what seems to me the least successful chapter （“Seeing Past the Evidence”） she goes about placing her father in a police lineup with herself as “police artist,” putting together his face from bits of Bernard Berenson, H. L. Mencken, Ezra Pound and Henry Roth. She tries, but fails, to “become” her father by impersonating him, telling him stories. “I cannot bear to be my father,” she concludes, and she worries about her own balance. “Can I keep my own brain, sound and white, not seething, not fevered?”

Maybe. But her sentences do something like seethe and are, if not fevered, to my taste rather overheated. About her attempt to provide a “face” for her father she writes: “It must be a face without features. A face of light and air. A flame. Perhaps it is the face of music. Of beauty beyond the search for beauty. A face both human and inhuman. A face of love beyond the end of love.” The sentence fragments—a general feature of the book's writing—are supposed to create an atmosphere of anguished sincerity. But eventually this reader's sympathies were with the father who, as she imagines him writing in torment, asks, “Why are you doing this to me?”

The book's final pages, in which Ms Gordon succeeds in having her father exhumed and reburied, are informed by a Shakespearean vision of herself as “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” and she declares, proudly, that no obstacle will stop her. Nor does one. Her friends think she's “crazy” but loyally gather round; her mother, disposed originally to look on the project as a “wacky” idea, finally says “I'm so proud of you. My one and only.” In the book's last paragraph, the heroine realizes “that I'm not sad at all. That I'm very happy.” It is all a bit like Jane Eyre: the first person “I” endures and overcomes all obstacles as the world comes round to meet its demands.

In her preface, “To the Reader,” Ms. Gordon's claim about her father is that “having lost him, once, twice, I will have him forever. He is always with me, always mine.” By the end of The Shadow Man, that reader has seen the thing come to pass and must testify, if with some mixed feelings, to the dominance of such absolute literary power.