The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Memories from a Sinking Ship, by Barry Gifford
reviewed by Jeff Waxman

 

In this new novel from Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart, Back in America), we are drawn into a world of unspoken understanding, of gangsters, of Chicago in the 1950s, and into the world of a boy named Roy, a boy on the road.  As a character, Roy is singularly undeveloped, but he’s perpetually buoyant and fascinating in his unblinking observations of the people who populate his days. Memories from a Sinking Ship is presented in episodic chapters, some told in the first person and some told in the omniscient third, of Roy’s childhood spent alongside his mother, a sort of middle-aged Holly Golightly. She’s an independent and doting mother with a penchant for playing the playboys, each of whom is a rat, and Roy’s father is always felt, always a benevolent influence, and almost always absent. Gifford plays it loose with chronology—even after Roy’s father dies, his presence is palpable and, a chapter later, he’s alive. Roy’s own age seems to fluctuate between nine and twelve, though in some later chapters, Roy is as old as sixteen. This malleability of time only strengthens the narrative movement. In fact, this novel is so exquisitely structured and Gifford’s story so engaging that it surrounds the reader and the characters, tying us to them with rapid transitions and rich embroidery. More, there’s a persistent rhythm to it all, a constant throbbing like a train in motion or the beating of a heart, that permeates this work and brings the individual episodes into harmony, that makes this collection of scenes into a novel.  And there’s the constant movement, a pushing from place to place and from thought to thought as Roy coasts from Chicago to New Orleans to Miami back to Chicago—it’s not the great American novel, but it’s a great American novel, and Gifford is an exceptional artist.