Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy. As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father's friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve's childhood-his parents' legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father's past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.
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.
