The playwright turned novelist’s second novel turns on the way that Covid restrictions altered the social order, but its central story gets bogged down with endless diversions
The playwright turned novelist’s second book turns on the way that Covid restrictions altered the social order, but its central story gets bogged down with endless diversions, was impressive: it was a brilliant and moving saga of trauma and intergenerational conflict, longlisted for the Orwell prize for political fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award.
Porter’s second novel emerged from a conversation with Tom Stoppard in the days immediately preceding the emergence of Covid-19 ., the novel turns on the way that lockdowns altered the social order, both imposing impositions and offering some new freedoms.Darla Jacobson is three months pregnant. She lives in an open marriage with her bisexual husband, Theo Harper.
As in the first novel, there are several tangential narratives that circle the main story. We have Xavier, a bright but troubled student whose mother is on a ventilator. Then there’s Ruby Black, whose name Darla appropriates when she disappears . There are several chapters in Ruby’s voice – she speaks in page-long sentences and tells of her struggles keeping the restaurant she runs with her Japanese husband open in the face of the pandemic.
Perhaps the problem also stems from the fact that Porter uses a familiar framework here: the hunt for a disappeared person and her attempts to evade those searching for her. Roberto Bolaño said that all novels are detective novels – the reader is constantly looking for clues that will help resolve the mystery at the heart of the story. Here we invest a lot of time in characters who end up being incidental flourishes.
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