Surprisingly delightful and challenging ... For a few beats, The Rich People Have Gone Away seems to move to the groove of a domestic thriller, but Porter almost immediately undercuts that element of suspense ... The most striking quality of this book is how aggressively it careens off the main drag and darts down blue highways. I’ve never read a novel that pinballs so confidently from character to character, story to story ... This is the covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch.
Characters feel as if they’ve been included to add a certain literary richness – they contribute little to the central narrative. I wonder if this comes from Porter’s background as a playwright. In the theatre, sometimes it works for minor characters to be mere set dressing – only marginally more important than a standard lamp or a piano. In a novel, they need to justify the time we spend with them. 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. Again, this is a work of great ambition and elan, although the lack of control that was forgivable in a first novel is more grating and problematic.
Terrific ... The missing person drama is the meat of this story. Though not exactly a thriller, there’s more than enough plot, and quite a few twists, to keep readers quickly turning the pages. Just don’t turn them so quickly you miss the central messages Porter is delivering.
