Semiotics of the Semi-True : A GOOD MAN TO KNOW: A Semi-Documentary Fictional Memoir, <i> By Barry Gifford (Clark City Press: $21.95; 184 pp.)</i>

An author’s note preceding this slim volume quotes the definition of the Japanese form shosetsu : “a piece of autobiography or a set of memoirs, somewhat embroidered and colored but essentially nonfiction.” A glance at the list of 22 publications where parts of this book earlier appeared may make some readers suspect shosetsu is closely related to “garage sale,” but in fact “A Good Man to Know” is a surprisingly graceful, quietly affecting account of a boy--and the man he became--coming to terms with a father he barely knew.

The pages before we’re actually into Barry Gifford’s story are overly busy--with the above definition, with the list of the dauntingly fecund author’s 26 previous books, with epigraphs from Sidney Zion, Nelson Algren and Roland Barthes, and with the title page’s redefinition of the playing field: “A Semi-Documentary Fictional Memoir.” Semi-documentary? Have we finally reached the book-length equivalent of “You didn’t get this from me, but . . .”?

The reader’s suspicion is understandable. By habit we contentedly abandon ourselves to fiction, and for different and equally good reasons we like true stories. Even the roman a clef , almost always a pulp romance these days, has its place. But we mistrust the semi-true. It’s a form that hides its boundaries or, worse, moves them for its own convenience. Either way, we don’t know where we stand, and tend to suspect the author of protecting or ennobling himself, or at least casting a shallow light on others to fulfill some agenda beyond simple storytelling. That’s why we discount most barroom tales of bravado or injustice until the speaker raises a finger and says, “True story.”

That’s most of the bad news. Gifford doesn’t explain why he’s gone semi-, who’s being protected or what the literary benefits are. But in the first of many brief chapters, the one that lends the book its title, he settles right into the economical narrative style that animates much of his work, including the now famous “Wild At Heart”: “I was seven years old in June of 1954 when my dad and I drove from Miami to New Orleans to visit his friend Albert Thibodeaux.”

Suddenly, after all the formal set-up, we’ve been oxygenated. Gifford has a crafty touch with details--the powder-blue Cadillac Dad is driving, the smell of his Lucky Strikes mixed in with river smell and malt from the Jax Brewery, and later, the drive across the Huey P. Long bridge, “where a freight train was running along the tracks over our heads.” Whether or not that freight train was there at that moment in the summer of 1954, we’ve been immediately seduced into the pleasures of semi-documentary experience. Rudy Winston, the Dad in question and the book’s title character, is not a talkative man. But we see in this chapter his knack for epigrammatic pitch when the son, our narrator, says it feels like it’s going to rain: “It always feels like this in New Orleans,’ ” he said.

Rudy Winston is veiled, oracular, and semi- (there’s that prefix again) legendary as a Jewish gangster. Thus the Roland Barthes epigram Gifford quotes: “The father, dead very early . . . merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty.”

The book is structured as a pilgrimage, and it’s not only Rudy Winston but the taciturn, amiable crooks in his orbit who speak such homely and practical truths. Various relations are memorably heard from as well. A man called Uncle Buck (no relation to Hollywood’s recent John Candy vehicle) has some claim as a surrogate Dad, and supplies his own kind of wisdom. Our narrator asks if he’s worried about being caught with an illegal alligator hide he’s just skinned: “ ‘People have to live,’ he said, ‘Not worry. A man can’t do both and expect to get away with anything.’ ”

Gifford’s journey partakes of nostalgia, but it’s almost never cheaply sentimental in its particulars. Loneliness is its constant subtext, but not self-pity. We watch the kid become a man, learning to make his own fun, savoring the characters he meets, taking nobody’s crap (“Memoir of a Failed Cadet” is a droll episode wherein he clashes with a “baby colonel” in ROTC).

Occasionally the seams show. “I’ve always thought of Moe as the kind of guy my dad would have liked . . .” goes part of the introduction to a pedestrian chapter about a mechanic buddy, soon giving way to a chapter that starts, “The only one of my friends who remembers my dad is Big Steve.” Big Steve has already been profiled in Gifford’s “The Neighborhood of Baseball,” and this time we get scraps. We have more baseball diarists than we need, Gifford hardly being the best of them, and he luckily steers clear of that neighborhood except in spots. Some chapters feel like simple chattering, as when Gifford explains, “I was a fairly manic kid . . .”

Scattered through the text are photos of the author as a child, sometimes with either parent or with Willie, the son his dad has with second wife Eva. These semiotics of semi-autobiography lend a resonance to the prose alongside. What doesn’t quite cohere is the last quarter of the book. Here we get three short obits of his dad and newspaper clips about gangsters of Winston’s circle, like “Dago” Mangano, Willie (The Hero) Nero, and Samuel (Dummy) Fish (the latter a Dillinger pal; Winston was convicted of being his accessory in receiving stolen property).

Finally, there’s a long FBI report entitled “The Gulf Coast Bank Sneak” implicating Winston in the theft of $20,000 in bonds from a bank in New Orleans. A key figure is Albert Thibodeaux, the man father and son went to meet in New Orleans at the book’s start. This sheaf of documentation doesn’t sing as it was meant to, and the pages feel like appendices, tacked on to supply the authenticity we already forgave the book for fudging.

No, the task of this book is the pilgrimage. Time and place are fractured with the illogic of life itself in the diverse string of episodes. Gifford has already memorialized his mother in “An Unfortunate Woman,” and she is almost as spectral a presence here as his father. Their divorce occurs when he is quite young, and the narrator is only 12 when his father dies. Gifford’s search moves inward, through a maze of concentric circles marked by gangsters’ asides, and we follow it willingly. En route, we realize ever more forcefully that despite allusions to his writing success, a key mission of Gifford’s life has been to seek out clues to his dad--partly to read what he can of his own destiny in them.

In life as in death, Rudy Winston was a cipher. The true center of the story occurs late, when the narrator comes home from school to be told by his mother that his dad died that morning. “You never called him last night like I told you to,” said my mother. “Did you?” Staring out the front window, our young protagonist pictures his dad coming down the street, and then his mother starts talking. “At that precise moment time began to pass more quickly.” Of course, the writer will discover, time at that moment also stood still. Memory and legwork will have to retrieve his father’s image and substance, and the search will last a lifetime.

“A Good Man To Know” is a book about loss, yes, but more poignantly and unusually, it is about the loss of something that was never truly held.