Book Review
Book review: “The Imagined Life” by Andrew Porter
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman
The decades following World War II were the golden age of the campus novel – fiction about the aspirations and agonies of college life. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Bernard Malamud’s A New Life, John Williams’s Stoner, and David Lodge’s Changing Places were published during a time of expanding enrollments and widespread reverence for higher education. The Imagined Life, Andrew Porter’s new contribution to the genre, arrives as universities are being attacked and defunded. A campus novel about the expulsion from campus, it is the story of a brilliant professor who, denied tenure, loses not only his job but also the core of his identity.
The narrator, Steven Mills, was eleven years old when his family disintegrated as his father lost his job at fictional St. Agnes College in Fullerton, California. Devastated by rejection, his father, whose name is not given, simply vanished. Now, forty years later, Steven undertakes a quest to find out who his lost father was and where he is, if he is even still alive. As he seeks out former colleagues and friends of his father who can help him understand the man, Steven lives out of his car. Having abandoned his own wife and son and his job teaching creative writing at the University of San Francisco, he is replicating the family pathology.
Porter, who directs the creative writing program at Trinity University, demonstrated his mastery of short fiction with both The Disappeared (2023) and The Theory of Light and Matter (2018). His command of the longer form was apparent in In Between Days (2012), an achingly taut novel about the collapse of a marriage in Houston. By focusing on a missing father, The Imagined Life extends the theme of evanescence that suffuses the stories in The Disappeared. Like those stories, it, too, is narrated by a middle-aged man whose voice is irresistibly congenial. However, Porter has now moved his setting from Texas – San Antonio, Austin, and Houston – to California. Many sites in the Golden State – Fullerton, San Diego, Loma Linda, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, San Francisco, Petaluma – figure in the life of Steven Mills and his search for his father.
“Insecure and confident, narcissistic and selfless.” The profile of Steven’s father that emerges from interviews with men who knew him is a bundle of contradictions. “Easygoing and jovial, according to one person, but shy and withdrawn according to another; a good sport with a great sense of humor in one situation, overly sensitive in another.” Steven himself remembers a charismatic teacher who was also the life of the wild pool parties held at their house. He also recalls how his father’s love for a male colleague, Deryck Evanson, competed with his love for Steven’s mother. It and his father’s self-sabotage of an ambitious book project were factors in his alienation from St. Agnes College.
His father’s disappearance left Steven “consumed by a kind of quiet rage, a nihilism that would follow me all the way through middle school and high school and even into my first years of college.” Four decades later, the story he tells is a way of trying to heal that residual rage. Whether or not he ultimately finds his troubled father is less important than whether he finds peace.
In a kind of coda, the novel echoes its title. “In the imagined life, so much is different,” says Steven, as he tries to fantasize the road not taken. If his father had not been fired from St. Agnes and then left the scene, how different would the lives of both father and son have been? “In the imagined life,” writes Steven, “I have a strange and often challenging father, but I have a father.” Steven has spent his life trying to imagine what a difference that would have made.
“The unimagined life is not worth living,” proclaimed Socrates during his trial for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens. The dictum is a tautology, since it is only through imagination that we ascribe worth. Without imagination, nothing is of value. Envisioning its own alternative plot, Porter’s painfully plangent novel is a tentative victory of the imagination over disruption and loss.
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“The Imagined Life” by Andrew Porter; Alfred A. Knopf 2025; $28.oo