Whether we first met at the door, or in the airport, it was usually evening and his style of greeting wouldn't change much: “Just let me look at you.” Sometimes he straight-armed and cupped my shoulder. Eyes squinting, teary. It wasn't clear if he had me in focus. Or if, like drunks are wont to do, he simply stayed within himself, staying with what he already knew.
Just last week, with no library books that I have on hold due to become available any time soon and nothing in my TBR stack calling out to me, I tried to remember those authors whose works I have particularly liked in order to dive into their backlists; and remembering how struck I had been by many of the short stories in Juliet Was a Surprise, Bill Gaston was one of the authors that I thought I should definitely revisit. And then I went to work and discovered I had an Advanced Reading Copy of Gaston's new memoir, Just Let Me Look at You, waiting for me and that felt fated. I tell this longish story to explain why I read this book, because after having finished it – and loving it – it's hard to imagine why another reader might be compelled to pick this book up: Gaston didn't escape a cult, lose all his limbs in a freak accident, or found a billion dollar tech company; but he has lived a larger-than-average life (from teenaged charter boat captain to semi-pro hockey player to award-winning author), and throughout it all, he has had an unusually complicated relationship with a larger-than-life father. Another reader should pick up this book because while, no, Gaston isn't an ordinary person who survived the worst thing ever and then went on to write an amateurish account of his experience, he is a professional writer who is able to capture and expertly extrapolate the universal from his unique story. I enjoyed this book very much and hope that it gets the audience it deserves. (Usual caveat: I am quoting from an ARC and passages might not be in their final forms.)
I won't turn back. I reckon I'm maybe halfway across anyway. I also know this fear isn't just about the waves and wind. Beneath it a more sober eye knows this is a voyage to my past, upriver – I'll say it – to my personal heart of darkness. I'm going to see my father at his worst. I'm going to visit myself when I was always alone, a hermit, actually, busy worrying but never deciding. I'll remember exactly what my sixteen-year-old mind felt like. And then discover myself too suddenly sixty. I will feel the hell of time. A life almost gone now. Though I can't hear myself over the engine noise and radio static, I whisper, only minimally sardonic: “The horror”. And I crank up the throttle again.Just Let Me Look at You follows a familiar formula for memoir: Bill Gaston, in memory of his late father, decides to retrace the route through the Salish Sea off B.C.'s coast that he and his father had fished together many times over the years. Gaston describes what he sees in the present (including all of the emotions that the familiar sights bring up) and then allows his mind and pen to drift through history, detailing both his own past and what he was told of his father's past (while foreshadowing that his Dad's stories might not have been the whole truth). The narrative has adventure (with a squealing alternator belt that may or may not pull Gaston's boat through the chop), the interesting nitty gritty of salmon fishing, an environmental subtext (where have all the fish gone?), and the emotional pull of fathers who disappoint their sons through the generations. Looming over everything is Bob Gaston: six foot five and loosey-goosey, he pulled himself out of Depression-era childhood poverty to become an executive at Sears – able to provide his own family with cars and boats and an inground swimming pool – and while he was never mean or violent, Bob was always drunk. And like any teenager, the adolescent Bill eventually decided that his father was too embarrassing to claim as his own.
I pretty much wrote off my father that night. Such a decision isn't exactly conscious, but more something that happens in the body. Constant disappointment becomes a kind of disgust. Eventually a big switch turns off a big light.And yet, even when Bob was at his worst, Bill always knew that there was love beneath his stumbles and slurs:
A father bragging about his kid was only a hair's breadth removed from bragging about himself. And just as ugly. Uglier. But a contradiction was so confusing it kept me in a kind of mute shock: How could I hate someone whose only drunken crime was to be so proud of me that they couldn't hold it in?Just Let Me Look at You skillfully balances the past and the present, purposefully sharing bits from here and there, and although the event had occurred years earlier, when Gaston describes his father's passing near the end of this book, it comes at just the right time to have the greatest emotional impact. This is expert memoir in words and pacing.
So instant is my understanding that it will take me years to catch up and comprehend more fully, even as my visual memory of the moment grows less and less sharp. I'll never fully comprehend, or be able to describe it well enough, even to myself. It's a teaching unlike any other I've had. What my father showed me has let me not only understand him, but everyone. And, with no effort involved at all, to forgive. This understanding, and its forgiveness, includes myself.This book has appeal on many levels – the scenery, the history, the fishing, fathers and sons – but primarily, it's simply a well-written account of how some humans made their way through life; and that ought to be of interest to all.
