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The Imagined Life
By Andrew Porter
Knopf
274 pages
Steven Mills, the 50-something protagonist of Andrew Porter’s new novel, The Imagined Life, is an unhappy man. Separated from his wife and rarely seeing his young son, Steven struggles to find meaning in his life and academic work.
Even more problematic, he remains haunted by his father’s mysterious disappearance from his life almost 40 years ago.
In a series of flashbacks, Steven recalls a difficult childhood, especially when, aged 12, his seemingly bucolic world unraveled. The triggering event is his father’s unsuccessful attempt to gain tenure at St. Agnes College, a fictional institution in Fullerton, California. He also remembers pool parties at their home, hosted by his father and his long-suffering mother:
“I’d peek out the window and see [my parents], sitting down there with their friends, passing the joint back and forth and talking quietly, stifling their laughter with coughs. The blue-lit pool would be cast in silhouette, a group of bobbing heads, swaying uneasily underneath the palms.”
Much of the novel takes place in 1984, and the author serves up plenty of 1970s/1980s cultural name-checking to anchor us in time and place. There’s David Bowie, Natalie Wood, Love Boat, Hogan’s Heroes, and especially Fleetwood Mac and their album Rumors. Steven’s memories of that time lend resonance to his present-day goal—finding out why his father disappeared from the family (soon after St. Agnes denied him tenure) and why he’s been absent throughout his son’s adult years.
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In The Imagined Life, Steven comes across as a deeply reflective child, confused by his parents’ distant relationship, and the presence of pool party guests coming and going from the backyard cabaña. Not incidentally, many of the guests are men, including one, Deryck Evanson, who emerges as a key figure—most likely, in a romantic way—in his father’s life.
These cunningly depicted memories are told in long flashbacks while Steven drives up the coast of California, meeting with his father’s old friends and colleagues. During these encounters, he realizes, long after the fact, that his father’s mercurial behavior was likely due to being afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.
At the same time, crucial information about his unnamed father’s motivations sometimes seems awkwardly withheld. And because of the young boy’s constant surveillance of adults, passive phrases like “I saw” and “I watched” and “I nodded” frequently occur, creating an unnecessary distance between reader and narrator.
The elegiac tone of The Imagined Life is complicated by the fact that Steven doesn’t really know what he’s after. When one of these friends asks why he doesn’t hire a private investigator to locate his missing parent, he responds: “This trip, I’d told him, wasn’t about that; it was about something else. I just didn’t know what.”
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In general, Steven’s motives are frustratingly opaque. What precisely does he expect to achieve on this journey of discovery? And why now? At one point, he contrasts his personal resolve (or lack thereof) with that of the people around him:
“I’d always admired people like my father and Julian and Alison because I’d never had anything like that myself. I’d never had that kind of purpose. Instead, I’d always felt like I was hiding in a bunker, avoiding shrapnel, or chasing phantom memories and dreams. Half the time I hardly felt there at all, like I’d been hollowed out, abandoned. Like I had become the residue of another person’s life.”
Memories of his lost, poignant childhood are vividly rendered. One day Steven accompanies his father to a movie theater, not knowing it will be the last time he sees him in the next 40 years. His father, an avid cinephile, “treats” his son to, of all things, a showing of L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic arthouse film. It’s a day Steven will never forget:
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“Years later, I’d freeze-frame this moment in time—this quiet moment before the curtain went up and the movie started, this strange little lull in what was otherwise a fairly chaotic day, the two of us sitting side by side in the dark theater, elbows touching. Beneath me, I could feel my sneakers sticking to the theater floor and all around us I could smell the scent of stale popcorn, but for those brief quiet minutes it felt good to be next to him, to be in his presence, to be close to his voice.”
Despite occasional fuzziness in plot and motivation, The Imagined Life is a loving portrayal of Southern California in a far different era, and the ways in which a father’s aberrant behavior can affect—if not scar—a child for life.
Author Bio:
Lee Polevoi, Highbrow Magazine’s chief book critic, is the author of two novels, The Moon in Deep Winter and The Confessions of Gabriel Ash.
For Highbrow Magazine
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