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.
