The Phantom Father

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Rudy Winston, the father of novelist and poet Gifford (Wild at Heart), was a Chicago liquor-store owner with a criminal record. He's remembered by his son in this collection of autobiographical fragmentsor, to be more accurate, his absence is remembered. More often than not, Rudy, who divorced Gifford's mother when his son was eight, fails to appear. A typical anecdote describes the time he didn't show up to see Gifford win a bowling trophy. Other anecdotes include memories of baseball; summer camp (the embarrassment of bed-wetting); school (Gifford being publicly accused of smoking by an irate janitor); the author's grandfather; time spent fishing in Florida with a favorite uncle; a Chicago amusement park; death (a neighborhood butcher hangs himself; a Bears football fancarrying two large beersdrops dead at a game). Rudy himself died when his son was 12, a year after Gifford's mother married for the third time, and his memory becomes a stronger reality than his presence was: as the man who brought Gifford comic books when he was sick, who made it into the newspapers by knocking a guy through a plate-glass window. After his father's death, Gifford goes to live in Florida with his mother's brother. Ultimately, it's recollections of Chicago and the people he knew there that give this free-form but affecting memoir its contours. The concluding section "My Mother's Story," told in the first person from her point of viewis at odds both stylistically and thematically with everything that comes before. Photos. (May)

Library Journal

Gifford returns to familiar territory with this novel of lust and revenge set along the Mexican border and in New Orleans. The episodic narrative revolves around the beguiling Ava Varazo, with her "coal-lustrous mane" and "reptilian green eyes." Working in a brothel in La Paz, Arizona, Ava entices lovestruck DelRay Mudo to help her kill the wealthy owner of a "chain of whorehouses across Texas" who always keeps at least half a million bucks at home in his mansion. Ava then turns on DelRay and goes home to Mexico with the money to purchase "arms and ammunition" for the revolution, leaving in her wake a string of admirers and dead men. This flashy novel reads like a Quentin Tarrantino screenplay, with lots of fast action, big guns, and cunning women. With their campy dialog and simplistic actions, the characters never become more than figureheads in the plot. Gifford, the author of many books, including the popular Wild at Heart (S. & S., 1988), is currently a darling of Hollywood, having turned several of his novels into screenplays. Expect this one to follow suit, and wait for it on the big screen. Purchase for fans of Gifford.Charlotte L. Glover, Ketchikan P.L., Ak.

Salon

[N]ovelist and screenwriter Barry Gifford's memoir The Phantom Father has one heck of a subject at its center: Gifford's father, Rudy Winston, was a racketeer who ran an all-night drugstore/liquor store in Chicago in the 1950s, a man who throughout his shady career was linked with underworld figures like Ben Siegel and cohorts of Al Capone. The only problem is, Rudy was such a mystery man to Gifford (Gifford was 8 when his parents separated, in the mid-'50s, and he was 12 when his father died) that he doesn't quite know how to reveal him to us. Gifford seems to have dropped all the right poignant details into place. Not long before Rudy's death, he and the young Gifford took a trip to Florida. Gifford recalls accidentally walking in on his father, who had just undergone a colostomy, in the bathroom. Gifford writes of seeing the pain on his father's face, but his macho streak cuts across -- and mars -- his prose like a zigzag scar. "I didn't like seeing my dad so uncomfortable, but I knew there was nothing I could do for him," he writes tersely, and although his compassion is self-evident, you wish he'd cut the stiff-upper-lip crap just for a second. It must be tiring to be such a manly man all the time, and it sure is exhausting to read about it.

But Gifford does have his charms as a storyteller. Instead of being a plain meat-and-potatoes memoir, The Phantom Father is a series of vignettes with smudged edges, and some of them hang together nicely. Gifford doesn't try to wrap up each one with a tidy little summation -- life just doesn't work that way, and his honest recognition of that is refreshing. In one chapter, he reminisces about his maternal grandfather's fur business, which provided fine pelts for society ladies and gangsters' molls alike. He recalls seeing some of those clients at a particularly swanky Chicago restaurant in the '50s, and the chapter ends this way: "Many of the women who had bought coats, or had had coats bought for them, at my grandfather's place ate there. I was always pleased to recognize one of them, drinking a martini or picking at a shrimp salad, the fabulous dark mink draped gracefully nearby." It's an abrupt ending, and a strange one -- as if the chapter had jumped off its own little cliff -- but sometimes that's the only way to wrap up a memory. Being a manly man has some benefits: You can't be bothered with lots of frills and furbelows, and sometimes that's a very good thing. -- Stephanie Zacharek

Kirkus Reviews

Gifford's baffling but enjoyable memoir of his father, a Chicago bookmaker and hoodlum, is stitched together with material from his earlier books and, admittedly, "contains elements of fiction" and is "somewhat embroidered and colored."

It's not always easy to discern the factual from the apocryphal, but novelist Gifford's (Baby Cat-Face, 1995, etc.) lively material makes that beside the point: Rudy Winston, owner of the Lake Shore Liquor and Drug Store at the corner of Chicago and Rush streets, was a fascinating, elusive character. Rudy "was a good man to know," as they said. During the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, he had connections to everybody from John Dillinger to Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. Willie "The Hero" Nero and Johnny Reata, a man reputed to have made his money running guns to the Dominican Republic, were among his known associates. His own rap sheet was fairly modest, the worst being a one-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to the receipt of stolen goods. Gifford writes of all this in short takes, with some pieces scarcely mentioning his father, focusing instead on his oft-married mother (she divorced Rudy when Gifford was five years old); or his "listening to the news" on the radio, i.e., "the real news of blues, jazz and R&B"; or his penchant for telling wild stories as a child. Gifford catalogues his own set of misfit associates: Cueball Bluestein, who became a hitman for Dodo Saltimocca; Chuck Syracuse, a teenage cab driver who torched his own taxi so the dispatcher couldn't read the meter; Magic Frank, with whom he spent time at Bebop's Pool Hall. But mostly, it's about a father who took him to ball games and the fights, or brought him along on the occasional mysterious trip to small town to "see a man on business."

Perhaps appropriately, Gifford riffles through these images of his "phantom" father as if they were old photographs of someone he scarcely knew.