Fatherless: A Memoir by Keith Maillard

Reviewed by: Fatherless: A Memoir by Keith Maillard Katie Mitchell (bio) Keith Maillard. Fatherless: A Memoir. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 240 pages. Softcover. $23.99. Keith Maillard. Fatherless: A Memoir. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 240 pages. Softcover. $23.99. Keith Maillard's memoir Fatherless explores the void left when a father is absent and the insatiable curiosity that grows as his son searches for answers. What begins in his Vancouver kitchen with a simple phone call from a stranger to explain that his estranged father has died becomes a meandering journey to discern precisely who this man was and why he was so reluctant to call Maillard his son. The result is a book that is sometimes heartbreaking, often lighthearted, and always honest. An experienced novelist, Maillard manages to examine the roughest edges of his family history with harsh truth without begging for the reader's sympathy. What emerges is a portrait of a man who may not have fulfilled all of his son's needs but who was a vibrant presence in the lives of many others nonetheless. Maillard pieces together the fragments of a father who holds the key to his own history but stands as a complete stranger. He handles this complexity with a narrative voice that is many things at once—curious and angry, reluctant and voracious, soft and brutal. As the pages progress, an experience that begins with bitterness eases to a more tender portrait of a man who lived his life with full and round possibilities and, like the rest of us, didn't always make perfect choices. While the memoir begins in Vancouver, it winds itself through decades of history and miles of territory to land in [End Page 115] Maillard's native West Virginia. The distance between regions and cultures mirrors the distance between the writer and his father. He reconstructs not only the history of a person but also the history of a region and a time that is long gone. What results is a study of working life in the early twentieth century and the people who stem from it. Sketching the lines of his father's character, Maillard fills in the colorful pieces as they are revealed to him in interviews and letters. He searches for answers with a sharp tenacity and interviews his father's old friends, former students, coworkers, fellow Masons, ex-wives, and anyone else who can help him better understand where he comes from. A musician and a tap dancer with a distinct youthful bravado, his father becomes a character the reader approaches with fascination and frustration. The central tension in the book stems from the ways Maillard finds mirrors of his own experiences in his father's life despite his resistance to these similarities. They are both artists, one a writer and one a musician. They both had periods of feeling lost and untethered. And eventually, they both settled into solid lives as their fragmented pieces came together. The story can be heartbreaking at times, but Maillard keeps his distance, even calling his father Gene as he writes, always holding him at arm's length. Readers who crave a memoir with more heart will sometimes become frustrated with his journalistic approach to reconstructing his father's character. Between the lines of this distance, we feel the sting of his unanswered questions. He does not idealize Gene, but instead he leads us to see him as a man made of flaws resulting both from his own making and from the time and region that built him. Maillard's prose refuses to shy away from the truth of his discoveries, but never once does he paint this portrait with oversentimentality. The journalistic style becomes less [End Page 116] apparent as the pages progress, and we see a rejected son reckon with the rejection of a father who didn't measure up to expectations. What is unsaid often speaks louder than what is directly stated in this memoir, and Maillard does not blur the edges with description and softness. In the end, we are left with an honest record of a forsaken son coming to terms with his troubling...

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