Roy's World

October 12, 2020
Gifford (the Sailor and Luna series) collects his stories and novellas about a boy named Roy and his seedy, charming world for a staggering omnibus that includes 18 new stories and sweeps back to the 1973 collection A Boy’s Novel. Though he occasionally verges on adolescence, Roy is mainly portrayed as five to seven years old, picking up life lessons from showgirls, gamblers, gangsters, and hardscrabble streets , but still occasionally including a tender game of baseball, as in “The Winner.” Roy starts out life in Florida, where, as seen in “A Good Man to Know,” his father is involved in organized crime. Roy’s mother, after his parents’ divorce when Roy is eight, brings one “rat” after another into their lives, so much so that in “Unspoken,” Roy tries to arrange to live with a neighbor. In “Memories of a Sinking Ship,” Roy’s mom takes them both to live in Chicago. Here, the collection truly sings, where a man looks like a “Maxwell Street organ-grinder without the organ or the monkey,” and some stories take on the lurid and matter-of-fact tone of a newspaper crime report, such as “Sick,” in which a dead body is discovered on a lakeside beach. The stories highlight Gifford’s range of styles and registers, even if the book doesn’t quite cohere into a larger narrative. Taken story by story, this collection is full of gems.

Starred review from October 15, 2020
A selection of Gifford's semiautobiographical Roy stories was published in 2013, but this volume, issued in conjunction with an outstanding documentary about Gifford, directed by Rob Christopher and also titled Roy's World, offers a more complete view, including 18 previously unpublished stories. These brief but indelible slices of life detail the unorthodox coming-of-age of a Chicago boy named Roy Winston as he wanders the city alone or accompanies either his divorced father, a liquor-store owner and racketeer, or his unstable but deeply affectionate mother on their separate peregrinations around Chicago and the South. Whether on his own or with one or the other of his parents, Roy is always a sharp observer and an astute listener, finding warm hearts beating the sadness of the people he encounters, from a washed-up fighter with whom Roy plays chess or a tired stripper who counsels him not to end up like these bums come in this dive don't do nothin' but tell each other sad stories of the death of kings. The heart of Roy's journey, which takes him to various points of call, including New Orleans and Cuba, remains Chicago in the '50s and '60s, presented not in linear strokes but as a series of perfectly framed slides arranged on a narrative carousel. The stories comprise a road novel without a map and without a destination, but when we finish them, we know we've been somewhere real.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)