Is it ever possible for people to truly know their parents and the deep truths of their lives? That's the question Andrew Porter confronts with sensitivity and insight in his searching novel, The Imagined Life.
Amid a marital crisis, Steven, the novel's narrator, quits his job as a university writing teacher and sets out down the California coast. He seeks to solve the mystery obscuring the life of his father, a college English professor who disappeared without explanation 40 years earlier, leaving behind his wife and 12-year-old son.
In addition to his uncle, Julian, Steven visits a few of his father's former colleagues. One key missing piece of the puzzle is any communication with a fellow faculty member, Deryck Evanson, who almost certainly was Steven's father's lover and who has avoided Steven's attempts to contact him.
Although his journey is an effort to unearth and confront his father's secrets, Steven also comes to understand how the turmoil they caused marred his own childhood in ways that distorted his life. Porter (The Theory of Light and Matter) patiently knits these strands together, culminating in an impressively moving climax. Steven's father's "private obsession" with Marcel Proust hovers over the novel, highlighted by one quotation about grief he records that serves as an apt summation of his life: "It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused." Striving honestly to understand how one may have done that, Porter suggests, is a potential path to righting unintended wrongs and going on to live another day. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer