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 ... 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 toggles between description—of Steven’s trip up the California coast to question his father’s brother and former colleagues (the least successful part of the novel)—and evocative, fine-grained recollections of Steven’s preadolescent life. Mr. Porter’s conjuring of al fresco backyard faculty parties fairly gleams: old movies projected in the backyard, the smell of cannabis, couples swaying drunkenly to recording of ’50s crooners, and 'the quick flicker of sunlight on the pool water, a kind of dance that pulled you in.' Most poignant, though, are the accounts of Steven’s tentative, unsettling sexual connection with his best friend, Chau, and the too-infrequent moments of connection with his handsome, charismatic father.
Master prose stylist Porter 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.
