UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERIES OF AN ABSENT FATHER
Fatherless: A Memoir
Keith Maillard (West Virginia University Press, 2019) $27.95 | 231pp
In his own middle age, here is what the B.C. writer Keith Maillard knew about his father: His father abandoned Keith and his mother before the son could store up any paternal memories, and his mother said he was a good dancer and the cheapest man who ever lived. Beyond that, nothing.
All that changed in 1997 with a call from an American lawyer. Maillard’s father, Eugene, had died aged 96 in California, explicitly cutting his abandoned son out of his will.
Fatherless tells the story of the author’s painful and ambivalent efforts to learn abut the father he never knew, a quest that took two decades and connected him to his previously unknown relatives on his father’s side of an epically dysfunctional family.
With the expert assistance of his wife Mary, a documentary and genealogical researcher, Maillard digs into the scrapbooks his father left behind, interviews surviving family members, and reflects on his own experience of fatherhood to create a portrait of the father he never knew — a father who held down a day job at a nuclear plant and joined the Masons while performing and teaching tap dance and pop songs when he could get evening gigs.
Along the way, Maillard creates a profound and moving meditation on family, loss, betrayal and redemption. Readers who have savoured Maillard’s 14 lyrically polished novels will not be surprised that this memoir is beautifully written. (Maillard’s last novel Twin Studies was recently awarded the Alberta Trade Fiction book of the year award.)
And readers who, like this reviewer, see Maillard as one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation will welcome the insights offered here into the family wounds and aching absences that marked and shaped his fiction.
That said, the memoir, while cast in Maillard’s usual lapidary prose and reflecting his impressive ability to map the dark places in the human heart, is in some ways more ragged than his fiction. Nevertheless, it works well as a stand-alone piece that displays considerable psychological insight and brings to life a whole cast of working class characters in mid-20th century America.
For those of us who have already loved Maillard’s earlier work, this is a useful background piece. And the pleasures of the memoir may well take new readers to the novels, where Maillard’s most luminous treasures are stored.