Review by Booklist Review
As his marriage falls apart, Steven tries to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of his father who, in the summer of 1983, was an English professor at a small California college whose life had been derailed by an unsuccessful bid for tenure. Almost 40 years after the events themselves, Steven travels the Southern California coast, interviewing his father's former colleagues and friends. The more he learns, the murkier the story becomes: Was his father denied tenure out of jealousy? Did this setback precipitate or was it caused by his father's mental illness? As each new perspective and insight complicates his childhood memories, Steven begins to question the narrative he's created about his father's abandonment, and starts to confront hard truths about himself and his relationship with his wife and their young son. Master prose stylist Porter (The Disappeared, 2023) expertly evokes the heady atmosphere of Steven's memories while sharply rendering the costs of the "imagined life" that Steven has clung to ever since, possibly at the expense of his own. Recommend to fans of Paul Harding's Tinkers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the satisfying if muted latest from Porter (The Disappeared), a middle-aged writer sets out to discover why his father abandoned him and his mother four decades earlier. Steve has recently begun a trial separation from his wife and young son, and his quest unfolds on two tracks: by road, as he travels up the California coast to visit his disgraced English professor father's friends and relatives, and via memories, as he works through his last year with his father, beginning in summer 1983 when he was 11. He remembers his father's boisterous backyard pool parties at their home in Fullerton, Calif., and the days his father would spend in the cabana with close friend and colleague Deryck Evanson. Looking back, Steve recognizes that his mother had caught onto his father's affair with Deryck. His road trip includes a stop in Ojai to see his uncle Julian, with whom he discusses his father's failed bid for tenure shortly before his disappearance. "He was railroaded," Julian claims, defending his brother's merit and referencing an obscure controversy. Further up the road, Steve uncovers a few secrets as he tries to make sense of his own life in relation to his father's. Though there aren't many surprises, there's a comforting quality to Steve's insights about fathers and sons. This therapeutic novel is worth a look. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Porter's new novel traces a son's quest to find the father he hasn't seen or heard from in 40 years and, along the way, to figure out his own--in some ways discomfitingly parallel--life. Steven is now over 50. His modest career as an academic has plateaued and his marriage has gone stale, in large part due to his emotional withdrawal, a lifelong pattern he recognizes. Now, he and his wife have separated--"taking a break" is her preferred term--and he decides that to grope his way through this limbo he'll need to do the long-avoided work of excavating what happened back in 1984, when he was 12 and his father, a talented scholar and popular teacher, disappeared abruptly and permanently from Steven's life after a negative tenure decision that came during a spectacular public crackup. As Steven drives northward in California toward Berkeley and his young son and estranged wife, he stops off to interview his father's brother and several former colleagues. Steven's twofold goal is to learn more about the context and the causes of his father's flameout--the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, a near-compulsive tendency toward self-sabotage, and a conspicuous affair with a male colleague with whom, for a time, the father cohabited in a backyard cabana--and simultaneously to reflect on his own awkwardness and uncertainty back then, as a kid on the cusp of adolescence whose parents were suffering. Steven is aware, and we become ever more so, of the ways his own life and troubles have rhymed with his father's, and figuring out those stubborn, intricate connections is the goal; he is searching not for the missing father (if he's still alive) but for the insight (to be found in the imagined life that emerges from memory and notebooks and interviews) that might help get Steven unstuck. Psychologically intricate and briskly paced, this is an unflashy novel but an engaging one. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
