A fascinating portrait. . . . Foremost among Porter’s 20th-century forebears might be Richard Yates. . . . Like Yates, Porter writes in a style that is lucid and unadorned. . . . He is less caustic than Yates, and more forgiving; generosity, rather than contempt, is the animating impulse. . . The Imagined Life [is] endowed with sympathy and propelled by the mystery behind the Mills family’s undoing. You want to find out what happens.” —Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times Book Review
“Poignant. . . . The Imagined Life toggles between description—of Steven’s trip up the California coast—and evocative, fine-grained recollections of Steven’s preadolescent life. . . . Porter’s conjuring of al fresco backyard faculty parties fairly gleams.” —Joanne Kaufman, Wall Street Journal
“Porter deftly combines a bildungsroman with the story of a midlife crisis to deliver a cathartic resolution.” —The New Yorker
“The immaculate beach vibes of Andrew Porter’s latest novel make it a perfect summer read . . . Porter’s atmospheric prose, pacing, human insight, and compassion forged a novel I couldn’t put down.”—Adam Morgan, Esquire
“Packed with so much summer you can smell the chlorine of backyard pools and feel the sunscreen clinging to your skin.” —Good Morning America (“Ultimate Summer Reading List”)
“Porter’s novel is astute about masculinity, shame, and the ways heterosexual matrimony can constrain both wives and husbands.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture
"With its quiet confidence and elegant precision, The Imagined Life is a masterpiece of memory, music, and longing. Andrew Porter is one of our finest prose stylists, and everything he’s turned his attention to here—a troubled adult son struggling to understand his troubled father; the slow disintegration of an American family; a boy coming of age amidst the wine and weed of California in the early ‘80s—shimmers into pure gold." —Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe
"The Imagined Life is a wise and elegant novel. Andrew Porter bestows so much grace on the confusion of growing up and the relatable anguish of looking back and recognizing our parents as people—true people—who struggle just as mightily with sorrow and love." —Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
"The Imagined Life delves into the space between the people we love and who we wish them to be. With unsentimental precision, Andrew Porter examines the flawed relationship between a father and son, approaching it with the grace of a true literary master." —Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Play for the End of the World
“A gorgeous, glow-in-the-dark novel, and the best book yet, from an unflinching, uncompromising writer of the highest order. A paean to the ‘unreliability of memory,’ the lives we imagine for one another, and the impossibility of ever really knowing those we love and those who love us most.” —David James Poissant, author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals
"The Imagined Life is haunting and intimate, Andrew Porter’s prose a master class in restraint and nuance and surprise. There are a handful of writers whose every book I will read, and Andrew Porter—because he writes novels like this—is one of them." —Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade
"Such an alluring novel, with echoes of The Goldfinch. I was completely absorbed by The Imagined Life." —Roxy Dunn, author of As Young As This
"A fever dream of a novel, the past a faded, flickering film reel of Hockney swimming pools, bleached skies and febrile Californian dusks where secrets and desires can only be half-glimpsed behind closed doors." —Karen Powell, author of Fifteen Wild Decembers and The River Within
"In measured and elegant prose, Porter gently unravels one family's life amidst the vindictive world of literary academia. Ambition and betrayal are beautifully counterpointed by sun-drenched Californian pool parties and a languid soundtrack of Fleetwood Mac and Frank Sinatra. Like the best of Richard Ford, this is a tender, melancholy book to savour."—Victoria Mackenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain
"Steeped in beautiful melancholy, The Imagined Life is a plangent, sensual meditation on forgiveness, written with finger-tip sensitivity. Boldly tender and calmly powerful, a novel to disappear into." ― Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days and What a Time to Be Alive
“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.” —Booklist
“Psychologically intricate and briskly paced.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An incisive, evocative new novel . . . Prepare to be moved time and again as Andrew Porter — through memory and music — compassionately renders the poignant journey of a son’s coming to understand the meaning of ‘father.’” —Steven Whitton, The Anniston Star
“A deeply engaging, psychological drama, a profound exploration of what drives people to make the decisions they do . . . The Imagined Life is [Porter’s] best book to date”—Rain Taxi
“A sensitive and insightful novel . . . Porter patiently knits [its thematic] strands together, culminating in an impressively moving climax.”—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness
“Mesmerizing . . .The Imagined Life has the heft and lingering aftereffect of a classic novel. Like James Salter’s Light Years or John William’s Stoner, it is sustained by the near perfect prose and psychological insight. Steven’s search ends not with questions answered or anger assuaged, but with a more mature epiphany, one of forgiveness and nonjudgmental love.” —Melissa Pritchard, Image Journal
“The Imagined Life is many things: a deft exploration of male relationships, a mediation on how much we inherit from those who raise us, a study of shame set across the AIDS epidemic, but above all, it’s a poignant, achingly beautiful story of human love, and the lengths we’ll go to for those we care for.”—The Irish Times
"The Imagined Life is compulsively readable... its owners can look forward to its vein of attenuated nostalgia and cautious hope." —The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“A deeply affecting and atmospheric novel”—Buzz Magazine (UK)
A beautiful novel about nostalgia and the impossibility of really knowing the people who brought us into the world.”—Laura Pezzino, Vanity Fair (Italy) (“the 40 Books to Read on Vacation”)
“Fascinating . . . a novel about the absence of parents and the impossibility of understanding them.” —Paola Maraone, ELLE Décor (Italy) (“10 New Inspirational Books”)
“A lyrical and dreamy road novel”— Roberto Festa, la Repubblica (Italy)
“Beautiful . . . with echoes of Brett Easton Ellis [and] Richard Yates.” —Mario Lavia, il Riformista (Italy)
“A coming-of-age journey with growth at every turn, inspiring reflection not only in the protagonist but also in the reader.” —Camilla Sernagiotto, Grazia (Italy)
“Porter's art is in showing how absence can be the engine to imagine, and how paradoxically, it is precisely through even the misunderstandings that identity is built.”—Maire Claire (Italy)
“Porter is one of the strongest voices in American fiction for the new millennium: for the clarity of style, the apparent simplicity of the narrative structures and the ability to give new life to the tradition of the family novel . . . on line with Yates and Cheever [and] Franzen’s Corrections.”—Luca Briasco, il manifesto (Italy)
“Tense and propulsive . . . Porter masterfully weaves the present-day interviews with vivid recollections from Steven’s childhood, scenes thick with tension, wonder, and the kind of unanswered questions that lodge deep in a young person’s psyche . . . the novel becomes not just a story of loss, but a meditation on legacy, identity, and the strange fictions we build around the people we love.”—Cooper Mickelson, Benicia Magazine
2025-02-15
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.
