The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter is a novel that speculates on family secrets and relationship dynamics, mental illness, memories and coming of age experiences.

Andrew Porter’s novel sees a middle-aged man who’s been carrying the burden of his father’s disappearance since he was twelve years old, determined to get to the bottom of what happened to this vibrant, volatile man.

Steven remembers his parents’ poolside parties in the early ’80s, drink and a few spliffs smoked, usually culminating in films projected onto the cabana house wall. His father was a bright young academic, popular, with a promising future ahead of him, tenure almost in the bag. In the summer of 1983, one such party proved pivotal when a young visiting academic turns up, charming many including Steven’s father. The evening ends in his father’s disgrace although twelve-year-old Steven can’t fathom why. The promise of tenure recedes as his father moves into the cabana house, ostensibly to finish his book, visited by his lover, and increasingly manic.

Opening with a lengthy flashback to the party, Porter unfolds his story through Steven, whose life has been overshadowed by loss and not knowing, in a narrative threaded with memories. His wife’s announcement that she can no longer bear his emotional distance has provoked a crisis in Steven who has always feared he might be abandoned again. The twelve-year-old Steven puzzles over why his father has been denied tenure, embarrassed by his increasingly manic behaviour. As the adult Steven visits his father’s colleagues, friends and beloved brother, a picture emerges of a man whose illness overwhelmed him, who dearly loved his wife but fell in love with a man who fell in love with him, and who was derailed by a college unable to accept him for what he was. Steven is an engaging narrator who drew me into this absorbing, compassionate novel about love, loss and a late understanding of how trauma can shape us.

The first party narrator Steven Mills (a writer and teacher), his marriage on pause having moved out of the house where his wife (a Social cause activist) and young son live, sets out to drive the Coast of California to try to trace and re-understand the story of his charismatic but volatile English literature academic father.

The latter in 1984 (when Steven was a teenager) disappeared from the family home (and their lives) after a series of on-off estrangements with Steven’s mother (connected both to his mental state – which appears to be some form of manic-depression - and his relationship with another male academic) and a similarly connected failure to get tenure at his University despite (or possibly because of) his popularity with students and his body of publications.

Having for years due to his anger at his father not tried to trace him – Steven’s attempts now to look for traces of his father and to re-examine his own memories are also about him trying to understand how this formative experience has adversely influenced his future relationships and in particular his seeming inability to commit to and invest in his marriage – a failure which lead to his wife’s suggestion of a temporary separation.

A 1960s Italian arthouse film (L’Avventura - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Avventura) which Steven remembers watching with his father on the day of the latter’s disappearance sets us up that there may be no solution to the mystery of his father’s disappearance of fate/current hereabouts so that in many ways it’s a surprise when we do get some resolution here (partly on the first albeit open to dispute, definitively on the second) but less of a surprise that Steven realises that his search was really an interior one and

In many ways this novel could be said to cover a number of relatively cliched topics: a largely campus (or more accurately mostly off-campus but still dominated by faculty members) novel; an examination of not just parent-child relationships but also the idea of a missing father; and to represent a relatively privileged group of individuals (set mainly in the Bay Area of California even the “modest” houses have swimming pools and decent size gardens) and at least pre-fall the life of the narrator and his parents is one of glamorous pool parties; as well as some not exactly uncharted social themes – the way in which homosexuality could only be acknowledged in small private social circles even in liberal 1980s California academia and how its more public expression could still ruin social cachet and acceptability; even a putative and explorative same-sex attraction as a young man (Steven’s close friendship with Chau while a side story to the novel is perhaps one of its strongest aspects – particularly as we sense how Steven’s lack of closeness with his father, his father’s close relationships with male friends and particularly the attractive colleague all impact on his unsuccessful attempts to really understand his feelings for Chau, so foreshadowing how similar issues will recur in his life and pertinently for the novel his marriage and own fatherhood).

And more generally despite the familiar topics this is a very smoothly executed, tightly written (the US edition's blurb’s description of “taut” is not misleading) novel with almost mannered prose which examines memory and time (Proust is a repeating and explicit reference) and rumours (rather more clunkily the Fleetwood Mac album of the same name is something of a lodestone for the teenage Steven, desperately trying to understand a father he still admires despite the erratic nature of his parenting and general behaviour) but in the context of family relationships.

It is also one I read effectively cover to cover which was an enjoyable and mentally satisfying reader experience.

If I had a doubt though it is that a book very much about memories, will I suspect not prove particularly memorable – not I think due to the writing but to the rather uninteresting protagonists/setting.

Nevertheless (with this caveat) recommended.