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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.
Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 15, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593538067
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593538067
- File size: 1012 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 15, 2025
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.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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