Daddy, I hardly liked you

Bloomsbury, pounds 16.99

Mary Gordon's new book is a departure from her usual territory of fiction. The Shadow Man is an autobiographical account of a daughter's search for her father, her emotions on finding him to be a very different man from the one she lost, and her subsequent actions.

Gordon's father died of heart failure when she was seven. She mourns the man she knew and enshrines him in her memory, likening him to a saint at the beginning of the book. "It is at this point that the story of my father's life conforms most closely to the pattern of the saint's life: the colourful, sinful past, the proud defier knocked off his horse by the whispered sentence."

For Gordon, who was later to smash her idol and then painstakingly rebuild him, her father as she remembered him was perfect - "The handsomest man in the world" - but with one startling flaw: he had no teeth and rarely wore his false set. We never discover why Gordon's father had no teeth, but we do discover that he was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism in the Thirties. He married a Catholic after the war and Gordon was their only child; and something of a miracle as her mother was crippled from polio. Gordon charts the changing perspective of memory and the different versions of the past she uncovers by seeking her father through documentation. Her task is difficult, there are no relatives with memories to offer. Even her mother has become senile. The census office and the New York library are her biggest sources for research.

None the less, she presents the reader with immutable facts. Her father was a writer, so there is evidence of his views in archives. He was antisemitic. In an article he wrote in 1943 he states that the concentration camps were not the worst crimes against humanity. Gordon writes of this evidence, "More important than Jews being murdered by the millions is that Jews are poisoning the world he is trying to save." He espoused MacCarthyism; he ran a soft porn magazine. To a left wing, liberal feminist such as Gordon, the man she finds is monstrous. Her attempts to come to terms with him makes for intense and often moving reading.

Gordon makes only passing reference to her mother until the final pages of the book when she is given a section of her own entitled "My mother speaks from the desert." And it is paradoxical that Gordon's portrayal of her mother is the most poignant and compelling element in this quest for her father. Gordon's mother is ancient and has no memories. "If she doesn't remember my father as a husband, then another part of him is lost. The history of them as a couple."

The book is divided into five sections, not chapters exactly, but different ways of looking at the same material. The sections have significant titles: "Knowing my father"; "Tracking my Father: in the archives"; "Transactions made among the Living". The titles enhance the impression of the book as a kind of therapy for Gordon. And the therapy was successful. By the end Gordon has come to terms with her father and is able to say, "Love is stronger than death."

Gordon has set out to take the reader on a voyage round her father. The journey is exhaustive but not always satisfactory as she offers too little context for either her father or herself. For the first part of the book these central characters are shrouded and struggle to support the density of the prose, but gradually a sympathetic, more colourful picture emerges. Of her childhood she says, "We behaved more like people in the movies than like the people we knew. My mother and I sang, my father and I danced to the radio. We all did imitations and told jokes."

The latter part of the book benefits from her decision to bring in her children and other relations, and even one or two friends. There is mention of a school play and a man who keeps falling into graves. By raising a smile here, Gordon underlines the solemnity and importance of her laying her father to rest at last.