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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIt is difficult to imagine a more consistently fraught relationship in this world than that of fathers and sons. Pretty much since Adam favored Abel over Cain, the father and son duo has been a dicey one. And that relationship doesn't get any easier when the father is absent, a situation which inevitably leads to a disorienting brand of existential chaos. For sons, the mother is the protector, the comforter. The father is the guide, the teacher. He instructs the son how best to steer his course. But take away the father from this trio and you've created a rudderless vessel, a boy and a mother forced into a life of trial by error, of bouncing off of rocks with the hope that by the time the open sea is reached, the damage inflicted will be minimal.\n\nThis fractured familial equation is the meat of Michael Hainey's new memoir, After Visiting Friends (Scribner). It is a story of a son trying to find out the truth of the events surrounding his father's sudden and mysterious death. Hainey's father, Bob Hainey, a Chicago newspaperman, died in the street on the North Side of Chicago in the wee hours of the morning in 1970. A copy editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob had just finished working the late shift as slot editor when a heart attack struck and killed him.&amp;amp;#xC2; He died alone next to his car. At least that was the story that a six-year-old Michael Hainey, his eight-year old brother, and his mother were told. It was his uncle, Dick, who delivered the news. And it was the sum total of what the two sons would know of their father's death for the next 40 years. Street on the North Side of Chicago, heart attack, middle of the night, alone.\n\nThat narrative never sat well with Hainey. While in high school he discovered that the obituaries written about his father did not align with the story that he was told. A phrase jumped out at him from the obits that had never been mentioned before: Bob Hainey died \"while visiting friends.\" \"Friends? Who are these friends? And why have I never met them?\" Hainey asks. And such is the acorn that grows the great oak of this memoir. It is the story of a son's search not just for his father, but for himself, and it is by turns touching, funny, captivating, and ultimately uplifting. After Visiting Friends, though, is more than a memoir. Much of the thrust of the narrative invokes a different genre, a genre soaked in whiskey, nestled in dark alleys, and populated by hard-boiled private eyes. It is a pulp detective novel threaded into the framework of a memoir. It is the story of family by way of Raymond Chandler. And like most successful detective stories, Hainey raises the stakes so that the reader not only wants an answer to the mystery, he wants to share in the experience of unraveling it.\n\nIn After Visiting Friends, those stakes are created by silence. Honor among thieves and all that. Omerta. \"You are growing up in a house where silence is the rule,\" Hainey writes. Whenever he would ask his mother questions about his father's death or her past she would remind him of the final scene of The Godfather. \"Some kids, their parents make them study the Bible, learn piano. Speak a foreign language. You\u2014you're taught The Godfather.\" Hainey's mother often reminds him about this scene. Michael Corleone has ascended to his place at the head of the family business. He has become his father. His wife Kay confronts him about his role in the murder of his sister's husband. \"'Don't ask me about my business Kay.' Your mother smiles and says, 'I love that line.'\" Codes of silence. Walls, constructed by Hainey's uncle, Chicago newspapermen, inhuman bureaucracy, and countless other entities, that keep him from reaching the truth about his father.\n\nIt isn't just mystery though that makes After Visiting Friends reminiscent of a great 30's pulp novel. Hainey's sparse prose is just as pitch perfect as the best of Chandler or Hammett. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is also the just-the-facts-mam style of the classic newspaperman. Hainey not only invokes his father in story, he invokes him in voice. In one passage, he describes a night with an old family friend at a bar with such Chandler-esque precision that you can almost smell the muggy haze of cheap liquor and cigarette smoke. \"I raise the remains of my watery Scotch. Clarence knocks it. We drain our glasses, put them on the bar. Glass on wood, the only punctuation.\"\n\nBut there is something else to the craftsmanship of Hainey's prose. His spare language evokes the sense of a self that is not quite whole. At one point, when questioning his faith, or lack thereof, Hainey reminisces on his childhood confusion over the opening line of the Lord's prayer, Our Father, who art in Heaven. \"Aren't in heaven? How many times did I puzzle over that?\" he writes, \"And if he aren't in heaven, where are he?\" But Hainey is left to ponder the question on his own. He bounces the zinger against himself, his humor entirely a cappella. In contrast, one could easily imagine this line as a conversation between another set of famous pulp characters, Dashielle Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles.\n\nThe musical banter of Nick and Nora is the spare prose of the hard-boiled detective, but paired with an equally adept verbal dance partner. What was a lament becomes a calypso. But when the dance partner is absent, as is the case with Hainey, a void is left, and the language becomes the sound of loss. His father's death created an imbalance that he is desperate to re-align. As Hainey says about the death of a parent, \"you never accept the truth that they are dead. You can't. You won't. In your head, you always believe that somewhere, they exist.\" He is a man searching for his father, which means that he is a man searching for what it means to be a man. He has, by necessity, been forced to experiment with identity without the benefit of a knowledgeable guide.\n\nAs always with experimentation though, no matter how vigilant the research, at some point everything becomes a shot in the dark. Hainey's hope is that by unearthing his father's story he will know who he is rather than wonder who he is. One of the most touching moments in After Visiting Friends occurs when Hainey is driving his elderly grandmother to breakfast for her birthday. At a stoplight, his grandmother asks him where the woman that he has started dating is. He tells her that she is traveling for work, to which his grandmother responds, \" 'What do they say?' she asks. 'Absence makes the heart wonder?\" Hainey then corrects her, \"No, Gram. They say, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.'\" When the light turns green, his grandmother looks up at him and says, 'That's what I said, Mike. Absence makes the heart wonder.'\"\n\nFollow @ScottChristian1"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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