Regina Porter’s first novel, The Travelers, was impressive: it was a brilliant and moving saga of trauma and intergenerational conflict, longlisted for the Orwell prize for political fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Porter had worked in television and was already a prizewinning playwright – it was perhaps inevitable that the novel would be cinematic and dramatically satisfying. If there was occasionally a feeling that the author didn’t assert total control over her narrative, that she might have trimmed the two-page list of characters at the start, these were minor complaints in the face of such brio and ambition.
Porter’s second novel emerged from a conversation with Tom Stoppard in the days immediately preceding the emergence of Covid-19 (we are told this in an acknowledgments section that isn’t afraid to drop a name or two). The Rich People Have Gone Away is set in a Brooklyn apartment block in the first year of the pandemic. Like Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and (albeit written before the fact) Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, the novel turns on the way that lockdowns altered the social order, both imposing impositions and offering some new freedoms.
Darla Jacobson is three months pregnant. She lives in an open marriage with her bisexual husband, Theo Harper. Theo, who came to New York from Iowa, is an “aesthetic adviser” to real estate agents, helping them to arrange the interiors of their high-end properties. The book’s title refers to the fact that wealthy New Yorkers have escaped Covid to their summer houses in the country. Early in the novel, Darla and Theo decide to follow them: her family have a cottage in the Catskills. On the way to the cottage, they stop on the portentously named Devil’s Path hiking trail. A storm blows in and Darla disappears. This is not before Theo makes a strange confession to his wife: he is of mixed racial heritage. “I’m only a fraction black.” It is suggested (although never fully explored) that this precipitates Darla’s flight.
We know from the start what has happened to Darla – the narrative, strung between Darla, Theo, the cops and a private detective (among many others), is driven by the question why? We are told “2020 was a watershed year to disappear”: the normal safety nets fall away during the pandemic. Something about the search for Darla strikes a chord with the public, though, and a viral campaign emerges on social media (echoes of Jay Slater are strong).
As in the first novel, there are several tangential narratives that circle the main story. We have Xavier, a bright but troubled student whose mother is on a ventilator. Then there’s Ruby Black, whose name Darla appropriates when she disappears (again, a gesture to a racial subplot that never fully plays out: Darla is white, Ruby is black). There are several chapters in Ruby’s voice – she speaks in page-long sentences and tells of her struggles keeping the restaurant she runs with her Japanese husband open in the face of the pandemic. These characters feel as if they’ve been included to add a certain literary richness – they contribute little to the central narrative. I wonder if this comes from Porter’s background as a playwright. In the theatre, sometimes it works for minor characters to be mere set dressing – only marginally more important than a standard lamp or a piano. In a novel, they need to justify the time we spend with them.
Perhaps the problem also stems from the fact that Porter uses a familiar framework here: the hunt for a disappeared person and her attempts to evade those searching for her. Roberto Bolaño said that all novels are detective novels – the reader is constantly looking for clues that will help resolve the mystery at the heart of the story. Here we invest a lot of time in characters who end up being incidental flourishes. Again, this is a work of great ambition and elan, although the lack of control that was forgivable in a first novel is more grating and problematic in The Rich People Have Gone Away. It left me longing for the 250-page book buried within this one, stripped of the diversions and longueurs.
The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
