I Had a Father: A Post-Modern Autobiography

A prize-winning novelist's journey in search of an elusive parent. Blaise writes that "even now I don't know if my father was sane or disturbed, a victim or a killer. I don't even know if I am his only child." He brings to his journey a novelist's eye, a detective's methodology, and an evocation of place unparalleled in modern letters.

Geographic lushness and a sense of mystery pervade the 52-year-old author's mazelike search for his roots and for the true nature of his father, a chameleon of sorts who deserted his family. Blaise ( Lusts ), a Quebec-born novelist, offers rich descriptions of French Canadian culture and of his migration to the United States. He provides much insight into how geography confers character, as captured in such pithy phrases as "border mentality." He also shows how one's lack of knowledge of one's homeland can also shape one's character. For Blaise, moving to a new locale is like having an affair: "I don't pick up people, I pick up hometowns." Montreal, Florida and Pittsburgh are among the places he nostalgically chronicles--all places where his father, Lee R. Blaise, a furniture salesman, ladies' man, boxer, Rotarian and sociopath, traveled with and without his family. The narrative trails off toward the end as Blaise tells us what he has been up to lately, breaking the nice tension of his tale.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A personal memoir that for honesty, interest, and the steadiness of its inner searching equals the very best of its kind, bringing to mind, for example, books like Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation. Longtime fiction writer Blaise, now past 50, sets out once and for all to determine who he is and where he's from, neither of these questions being simple ones in Blaise's case. ``I'm a native of nowhere,'' he writes; ``I do not know where I come from because I have come from just about everywhere.'' He was born in North Dakota to a mother from Winnipeg and to a French-Canadian father who remains the central and governing mystery in his life, and who, as a glamorously alluring but compulsively self-detructive businessman and salesman, moved his wife and son endlessly from place to place in the southern, eastern, and middlewestern US throughout the years of Blaise's growing up. Geographically rootless, Blaise's life was wildly indeterminate also in matters of social class (his mother was educated, his father was not) and ethnic identity--his father, secretive and less than honest in numerous other ways as well, tried to keep his French-Canadian origins hidden, even changing his name in a doomed effort to ``mainstream'' himself into the American middle class. Out of these family origins of ethnic and cultural indeterminacy and ambiguity- -family life also included divorce, violence, loss, and abandonment--Blaise has fashioned his own often exquisitely beautiful narrative of emergent selfhood and literary coming of age, assembling a lyrically quilt-like history of family and self that isn't afraid--the book becomes a kind of latter-day Huck Finn- -to take as part of its natural theme the unformed and often barbaric conscience of a nation. A compelling and unflaggingly intelligent autobiography from the author of two novels and four books of stories (including A North American Education), now director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This unusual memoir focuses on the author's attempt to understand his dead father. Blaise, a prize-winning novelist ( Lusts , LJ 7/83) and director of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, combines fragments of memories, mostly concerned with locations, as he circles around the story of his difficult, much-married father, a French Canadian/American traveling salesman. Like many people who had a problematic parental relationship, Blaise tried to lead a life radically different from that of his father: he became a writer, stayed married to one woman (the novelist Bharati Mukherjee), and endeavored to create a stable environment for his children. The book's strength lies in the author's skillful amalgamation of a patchwork of experiences to reconstruct his life as well as that of his progenitor. A thought-provoking work for all seeking insights into the father-son relationship.
- Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.