The Shadow Man, and: Where She Came From, and: Family (review)

Book Previews263 The Circle of Hanh, by Bruce Weigl. Grove Press (hardcover), 2000. 205 pages, $24.00. Weigl, better known as a poet than a writer ofprose, grew up poor in Ohio, not the south, but the themes are aU there—poverty, shame, violence. He would probably agree with Bragg about war and how it rearranges a boy's thin blood. Weigl's book is powerful, honest, unblinking, and at times both extraordinary and pecuhar. He weaves together the story ofhis youth with his years inVietnam as a foot soldier and, finaUy, the account of his uneasy return to Vietnam in 1996 to adopt a nine-year-old daughter, Hanh. "This is not a confession," Weigl writes, "except in the way aU stories confess. This is a journey to uncover the story of how I arrived at where I am and who I am." That passage offers us a pretty good definition of the memoir, and Weigl's fine book stretches the genre just a bit further than it has previously been stretched. Penelope Dugan On my first visit to the NewYork State Library inAlbany, I looked down from the top floor reading room to the roof of the Roman CathoUc cathedral next door. The roof was slate. How could this be? My father told me his plumber/roofer father and uncles put the copper roof on the Albany cathedral and were never paid for it. That story was the prelude to another story about why the eight Dugan brothers left the church. Since the cathedral didn't have a copper roof, my father's story couldn't be true. And ifthat story weren't true, then what about the stories leading from it explaining why there were great-uncles who belonged to Masonic Orders and brothers who didn't speak to brothers? Fortunately, my father was then alive to be asked about the roof. Turns out it was roUed lead for flashing that the Dugan brothers put on the roof aU those years ago. They stiU weren't paid, and they did leave the church. But now their reaction seems less righteous and more bloody-minded. That's the problem with family stories—they don't stay the same. Not when grown children want to know more. And with this additional knowledge, as the writers of these three memoirs show, family stories often become part of larger stories of immigration, of assimilation, of social and poUtical change. 264Fourth Genre The Shadow Man, by Mary Gordon. Random House, 1996;Vintage Books, 1997. 274 pages, $13.00. Mary Gordon's father, David, died when she was seven years old. At the age offorty-four, Gordon searches for the man who taught her how to read at three and who "loved her more than God." Her account is relentless and unsparing in detafling the costs ofwanting to know more. As she fills in the blanks in her father's story, discovering what is false, what is true, and what can't be known for sure, Gordon questions her own identity. Ifhe who made her isn't what she thought, then who is she? Gordon is a writer because her father was a writer. But, she learns, he was a bad writer with appaUing poUtics . She knows her father was a Jewish convert to Catholicism; she discovers his anti-Semitism in his writing. As a child, when aware that her father Ued, she "renamed the Ue. I called it a gift, a kindness."As an adult, searching through census information, Gordon finds out her father was not born in Ohio, as he had said, but inVilna. This shatters her. "The world we shared was a place of images and words, and what I have learned is that he was formed by images and words that he kept from me." This revelation marks the process through which Gordon recognizes her long griefand mourns her father as an adult. Having dug up her father's past, Gordon now has her father disinterred and moved to a family plot of her own making. The fam- üy stories are hers to reteU. Where She Came From, by Helen Epstein. A Plume Book, 1998. 322 pages, $12.95...