Book review: ‘In Between Days’ by Andrew Porter
There’s a reason writers love dysfunctional families — they are an endless source of dramatic fodder, encompassing just about every flavor of human neurosis and cruelty imaginable.
“In Between Days,’’ the debut novel of the well-regarded short-story writer Andrew Porter, is a welcome new entry in the canon. It offers a portrait of the Harding family, a broken Houston clan struggling to find a fragile balance.
As the book opens we meet Elson, the father and a borderline alcoholic struggling with the fallout of his divorce from his wife, Cadence, and with his once-promising but now shaky architecture career. Cadence, who probably married Elson too young, is trying to figure out what to do with a life that was defined by marriage and child-rearing for three decades. Their son, Richard, who is gay, is a hard-partying recent college graduate yearning to do something with his recently discovered talents as a poet. Add to the mix daughter Chloe, who is headed home from her college in the Northeast, having just been suspended indefinitely for an incident that she refuses to discuss.
At one point in the novel, Elson reflects on how strange it is that “you could have a family torn apart by tragedy,’’ one buffeted by all manner of catastrophe, and “yet you could still take simple pleasure in the fact that you were somehow a part of something larger and that the people around you needed you, that they depended on you, even if they didn’t know it.’’ This is as good a summary as any of the book’s themes, capturing as it does the complicated dynamics through which members of a family bring out the best and the worst in one another.
Despite its generally convincing emotional tone, there are elements that come across as thin. One of them is Richard’s nascent poetry career. We hear a lot about how important poetry has become to him, but Porter provides scant detail about what it is that draws Richard to poetry or why. His interest comes across as more plot device than character development.
The same type of failing appears in Porter’s treatment of Houston. The city is given to us as an important setting, suggesting that it will somehow inform at least the quality of action in the story. Unfortunately, little real sense of place comes across. We learn that Chloe’s classmates saw Houston as representing “big hair and cowboy hats and conservative politics, but to Chloe’’ the city was “the world of her childhood, a magical place, a place that she had always felt truly herself.’’ In this and other such passages, Porter never teases out more telling detail, never fully brings it to life.
More generally, Porter’s characters annoyingly spend a bit too much time thinking about what they are thinking about. At one point Richard says, “All he knows now is that he has played a part in it, that he is now responsible, that he is a complicit party.’’ Then, later, Cadence is dealing with Chloe’s troubles, and she “can only imagine the worst, and her concern for her now, for her safety, for her well-being. . . ’’ It seems like Porter is trying to mimic the nervous rhythms of worried thought, but it ends up overwrought and overwritten.
Despite its failings, the book is generally well-paced, and the frequent perspective shifts from Elson to Cadence to Richard to Chloe and back function well as a storytelling device. Moreover, Porter unveils the incident that precipitated Chloe’s return to Houston with deft gradualness, enticing the reader to find out more. In the end, “In Between Days’’ works fairly well as a family drama spiced with a touch of intrigue, but it could perhaps have been more.
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