Bad memories

Memoir: Many novels are simply disguised autobiographies. Some memoirs, such as J .M. Coetzee's curtly elegant Boyhood, written as it is in the third person, read more as novels.

US writer Dale Peck has also opted for the third-person voice in What We Lost when recalling an episode from his father's boyhood. Yet whereas the distance established when recalling his personal past serves the ongoing enigma which is Coetzee, Peck's account fails by being written in the style of a novel.

Few readers will approach this book, or indeed any book by Peck, without some caution. Now in his thirties, he is the author of three novels, yet has more emphatically created a literary reputation in the US on the back of savage, gunslinger reviews.

The more established the writer, the harder Peck punches. His is a self-styled crusade intent on improving literary standards. A wonderful agenda - but as every reviewer knows, it is easy to criticise and far more difficult to achieve creative greatness.

That such a tough critic should turn to family memoir is a surprise. Peck's father's childhood was a nightmare of injustice that perhaps denied him the chance of ever having a life. That man's son, Dale Peck novelist and rampaging critic, has set out to tell the story and in doing so, honour his father, a broken survivor about whom we learn little.

A son honouring a father is a fine gesture. But it is also a private act capable of backfiring when made public. Phillip Roth risked this in Patrimony when recording his father's battle with a cruel, terminal illness. A tough, explicit book and a brave one, Roth succeeds through the utter love and humanity with which he reports a battle with death. Peck's book, about battling life, is very different. There is too much distance and far too little love and humanity. At no time does Peck approach the grace and pathos with which British poet and critic Blake Morrison shaped his superb family memoir, When Did You Last See Your Father? The most striking thing about Peck's cold account is that it leaves the reader equally disengaged.

It is surprising that a writer who extends little mercy to the work of his fellow writers should so expose himself. If any discovery is to be made, it is that far from writing at a level removed from ordinary mortals, Peck proves not quite up to the task of recreating his father's past. Written in a neutral tone of hushed seriousness, and in the continuous present tense, the narrative drags its way through a confusing account shaped by melodrama, grotesque parental behaviour and divided loyalty.

Peck senior, the author's father, belongs to a complex brood of eight children by three fathers. The family live in squalor in a Long Island household dominated by a vicious mother who never emerges as more than a fairy tale baddie. Father, the author's grandfather, is a hopeless drunk, and Mother, Peck's grandmother, is a monster. She had had three children by other men before she met up with the author's grandfather. Her humiliating abuse of her husband and sons, particularly the author's father, is shocking.

The narrative begins by recreating the morning the author's father, then a boy, is woken by his father, the author's grandfather. The older man is making a bid to save his son, the author's father, from his mother by taking him away. That dawn flight, laced as it is with the smell of liquor, develops into a real chance for the boy.

Hope comes in the form of living with Uncle Wallace on his farm in upstate New York. Not that it is all that easy there either. Wallace's partner, Bessie, still unmarried to him, is initially wary. Other problems are created by Donnie, a farm hand intent on wrong footing the young newcomer.

Much of the urgency of the events is diluted by the prose style. Peck, although presenting this book as "a story of my father's childhood", writes it as a novel. This proves clumsy, as he and his father are both named Dale Peck and are both referred to in the third person. The heavy-handed literary style never relaxes, becoming progressively more self conscious. Far from adding to the drama, Peck's detached prose style renders it flat and cold. It is impossible to engage with what should be a heartbreaking story - but isn't.

Throughout the narrative the reader can not avoid wondering why Peck, having presented the book as a memoir, seems intent on writing it as a novel? The effect is one of stagy artifice. Daily life on the farm is shaped by hard work and the boy, the author's father, who also has a talent for running, becomes physically tougher. He has an unlikely sexual encounter at 13 - forensically described by his son the writer - but it is quickly forgotten. The boy concentrates on running, milking "the ladies", his uncle's dairy herd, and dodging Donnie's nasty streak.

Routine gives the boy purpose and sympathy for the cows. When one of them is seriously cut by wire he may have neglected to collect, he grieves for the cow's suffering. The death scene in the stable, which would have been difficult for many writers, certainly proves well beyond Peck the novelist.

The longer the boy stays on the farm, the more he discovers about his family, particularly his own father, the author's drunkard grandfather, whom he learns was previously married and had a son lost when that wife left. In time, the boy, the author's father, faces another upheaval. Mother arrives to take him home, prefacing it as his last chance to be part of the family.

Considering that her various children hardly know each other, her approach is at best hypocritical. The boy agrees to leave and in doing so, loses his uncle, who wants him to stay. Back home in Long Island, the author's father realises his mistake, only to find his uncle does not grant second chances.

There's further melodrama when Mother humiliates her husband before policemen, and then turns on the prodigal son, the author's father. But Peck the writer does not linger on this particular family episode.

Instead he flash-forwards more than 40 years to part two of the book, which fails completely. Remaining in the third person, he describes how he, as a grown man, and his father, now prematurely aged, decide to investigate the family's history. In a sequence of bizarre awkwardness, Peck the writer reports his father announcing: "My son's a very famous writer. Perhaps you've heard of him. Dale Peck. Tell her the names of your books, Dale." All the while, the author, still writing about himself in the third person, allows a minor character to speculate to herself about his sexuality.

Detachment as a narrative device in Peck's hands, does not work. There are many faults compounding the narrative's weakness - its tone is flat, humourless and passionless. Many of the dramatic reconstructions are self conscious and part two of the book is a disaster. Ultimately, the loss referred to in the book's subtitle is equated with the loss of a family farm. Far more was lost but Peck does not, or simply can not, articulate it.

Throughout this self-conscious, laboured performance it is as if he is frantically trying to convey the emotion he believes he should feel but doesn't. It is a story that could have gained much from being told in the first person, if not by a narrator, at least partly through the father's words, either as an older man, looking back on his boyhood, or perhaps even from the standpoint of the boy he was at the time.

But no, it remains confusingly suspended between the boy who became Peck's father, and the son who is Peck the writer. There is no sensation of real feeling or emotion, or even engagement between either set of father and son. As a family memoir, it reads more like an exercise in writing, caught as it is in Peck's oddly bloodless neutrality.

Writing a memoir in the style of a novel confers too much distance and leaves Peck searching for a tone he never finds. Perhaps pain such as this is impossible to articulate? Where is the anger? Where is the self discovery? How could the character of the Mother, Dale Peck's grandmother, be left unexplored? Why doesn't he explain the fact he and his father act like strangers towards each other? Why do none of the protagonists, who are real persons, emerge as real?

A powerful story may become lost in the telling and many writers eventually discover how difficult it is to write well, convincingly and eloquently, even a writer as confident as Dale Peck.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times