THE IMAGINED LIFE, by Andrew Porter
Andrew Porter’s fiction abounds in first-person commentaries, intimate and confiding, by male narrators unafraid to reflect poorly on themselves. Failure is their preoccupation — in career, in marriage — and ambivalence their default mind-set. These are men uncertain about what they want, and prone to an intelligent, rueful lostness. “Once in a while I’d have a feeling that I was missing out on something or being left behind,” says one, “but usually that feeling would pass.”
Porter’s new novel, “The Imagined Life,” follows Steven Mills, a writer and teacher chasing the mystery of his father, who vanished in 1984 when Steven was 12. A brilliant but unstable English professor, the father — whose name we never learn — had a breakdown after being denied tenure at a liberal-arts college in Southern California, and soon thereafter abandoned his family. The novel alternates between Steve’s recollections of that troubled year and present-day sections in which he drives the California coast to interview colleagues, friends and relatives of his long-lost father. Having recently quit his job and separated from his wife and son, Steve worries that he’s repeating the failures of his errant father; his “biggest fear in life,” he confesses, is that he will “inherit his affliction, his curse.”
In deep dives into the past, Steve retrieves a fascinating portrait of his father, a charismatic, mercurial man who dreamily quotes Proust in French but also rants with paranoid vehemence about colleagues conspiring to traduce him. Alternately melancholy and manic, and incorrigibly brainy, he’s an awkward parent; his idea of having fun with his 11-year-old son is to watch a Werner Herzog film together. As his professional and marital crises deepen, he exiles himself to the backyard pool cabana — “my father’s private sanctuary,” Steve recalls, “his cave” — emerging to host boozy, pot-smoking parties as Steve watches from the house.
“The Imagined Life” investigates a settled domestic unhappiness that verges into despair, capturing the poignancy of a boy alone in his room, listening to his mother’s muffled sobs in the next room, not quite drowned out by “The Tonight Show.” This is a novel of absence — not just of the father but also of a functioning present (we learn next to nothing about the adult Steve’s career or friends). And, finally, an absence of self. “I’d never had that kind of purpose,” Steve ruminates, comparing himself with a driven, successful uncle. “I’d always felt like I was hiding in a bunker … like I’d been hollowed out.”
American writing abounds in narratives of the problematic or absent father, and the terrain of Porter’s novel has been mapped by such classics of family dysfunction as Frank Conroy’s “Stop-Time” and Geoffrey Wolff’s “The Duke of Deception.” I also think of the narrator of Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” imagining his parents’ courtship and wanting to scream, Don’t!
But foremost among Porter’s 20th-century forebears might be Richard Yates, that incisive chronicler of men of fragile ego, men whose anxious lives carry an ever-accumulating cargo of failure and self-doubt. Like Yates, Porter writes in a style that is lucid and unadorned; in outfitting his prose, he skipped the metaphor shop, though he does make an occasional segue into lyricism to capture moments of repose amid the discord. He is less caustic than Yates, and more forgiving; generosity, rather than contempt, is the animating impulse.
There’s a large dollop of kitchen psychologizing baked into this kind of realism. Discovering a letter that Steve’s father sent his mother during their courtship, in which he quoted Proust on death, Steve and his wife, Alison, ponder its meaning in the days before their own separation. “Maybe it was about a kind of symbolic death,” Alison speculates, “a realization that a part of himself was dying.” Later, looking back on a time when Alison said he didn’t need to work so hard to please her, Steve reflects: “After that, I’d toned down my compulsive cooking and cleaning, but my abandonment issues remained, manifesting themselves in other strange ways, occasional bouts of jealousy and possessiveness, occasional periods of depression.” If you’re looking for keenly original wisdom, well, “The Imagined Life” is too realistic for that: Porter understands how far therapeutic categories have come to shape the ways we make sense of ourselves and one another, and he gives his characters the same well-worn conclusions that we so often reach in real life.
A privileged insight into other lives is one of fiction’s gifts. When those lives are dreary, carrying that gift through the long haul of a novel can become a chore, and “The Imagined Life” would be a downer were it not endowed with sympathy and propelled by the mystery behind the Mills family’s undoing. You want to find out what happens — or, rather, what already happened. As Kierkegaard said, life is lived forward but understood only in reverse. “The Imagined Life” moves in both directions, foraying precariously into the future even as it looks back in perplexity, and seeking understanding even as it attempts to salvage love.
THE IMAGINED LIFE | By Andrew Porter | Knopf | 274 pp. | $28
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