June 1, 2024
Porter's (The Travelers) second book is set during the start of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Privileged Theo and Darla leave Brooklyn for their upstate cottage during quarantine. Then Darla goes missing, and Theo is the prime suspect. Family, friends, and those left in the city all have thoughts. Prepub Alert.
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June 17, 2024
The striking latest from Porter (The Travelers) revolves around a woman’s disappearance during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla Jacobson, travel to Upstate New York from their Brooklyn condo in March 2020 with plans to hole up in Darla’s mother’s summer cottage. While on a hike in the Catskills, they get into a heated argument, during which Theo reveals his Black and Indigenous heritage and Darla, who is white, accuses him of being passive aggressive. She then runs into the woods and disappears. After Theo returns to Brooklyn, he reports her disappearance to the police, then hooks up with a previous fling (he and Darla have an open marriage, and he’s only nominally concerned about her). Porter flips through several characters’ perspectives including Darla’s, detailing how she adopts the name of her friend and neighbor Ruby Black and lays low in Niagara Falls. Also featured are Darla’s worried mother, who hires a private investigator to search for her, and Ruby, who stays in Brooklyn to watch over the restaurant she owns and is livid when she learns Darla is using her name. Porter keenly explores themes of generational and racial privilege and a community’s fragile bonds. This one makes the lockdown worth revisiting. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.
July 1, 2024
Porter's (The Travelers, 2019) latest adds to the growing number of pandemic novels that dot the contemporary literary landscape. In the hotspot of New York City, Theodore and Darla are at the center of the narrative. They have an open marriage and are expecting their first child when the novel opens in March of 2020. During the early fraught days of the pandemic, they decide to retreat to Darla's summer cottage upstate, where Darla goes missing, and Theo becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. From there, the novel expands to encompass a dizzying array of characters who are all dubiously and somewhat implausibly connected. Porter's three-part structure is cleverly crafted around the three major parts of a door and provides the backbone of the story: ""Door,"" ""Frame,"" and ""Threshold"" guide readers through the labyrinthine tale, which is inventive yet requires patience to follow. Beautiful black-and-white images are interwoven throughout, enriching the novel with a three-dimensional quality. Through it all, the common thread is the travails of quarantine that simultaneously connect and divide us.
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Starred review from July 15, 2024
Deep in the heart of the Covid-19 lockdown, a pregnant Brooklynite goes missing. Porter's sophomore novel again features a large cast of diverse New Yorkers, this time met during the spring of 2020. It opens with a list poem about the Union Square Greenmarket, then moves to a chapter called "Daily Cleanse" that starts with this sentence: "Mr. Harper takes sex in doorways." Theo Harper, a white man we never like much, works in real estate. He has an open marriage to a pregnant white woman named Darla Jacobson, whose mother is living in Paris and who counsels Theo to get Darla out of the city for "breathing room and fresh air." Darla's best friend is Ruby Black, a Black woman who owns a restaurant in Union Square with her husband, Katsumi Fujihara. There's also Xavier Curtis, "The Teenager in the Cardi B T-Shirt" (this and a number of other images are illustrated with small photographs), whose uncle lives in the same Park Slope building as Theo and Darla. Xavier is isolating in his uncle's empty apartment. It's a bit unclear where all this is going until a subordinate clause in the fourth chapter reveals that Darla, on the drive upstate to follow her mother's advice, "turn[s] off her cell phone, which would remain off until it was found in the woods a month later." The main plot revolves around Darla's disappearance after a fight with Theo on a hike during which he discloses that he has a Black ancestor; he becomes the main suspect in the police investigation. At the same time, we explore the back- and side stories of the other characters, finding nuggets of practical information and advice along the way--why dull knives are more dangerous, the use of cream of tartar to remove bathtub rings, a guide to the club scene in Japan, and this advice about loss, offered by a private investigator named Yvonne Tender: "Seek out the living and find little things to love until something or someone worth loving comes along." Meanwhile, a second mystery plot involving 9/11 surfaces. The novel eventually settles its gaze on matters of race and class, underlined by its breathtaking ending. This restless, intentionally unsettling novel establishes Porter as a distinctive, confident literary voice.
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