Andrew Porter’s new novel tells the story of Steven, a middle-aged man who sets out on what he calls his ‘project’ – a mission to establish the circumstances of his estranged father’s fall from grace several decades earlier. When Steven was eleven, in the early 1980s, his father, a literature professor at a private liberal arts college in California, committed a series of indiscretions – making passes at graduate students, conducting a long-term affair with a handsome colleague – that damaged his career and ended his marriage. 

At the novel’s start, Steven takes a temporary break, leaving his wife to care for their troubled son, and embarks on a road trip across California, interviewing his father’s relatives and former colleagues. Narrated in the first person, Steven’s account of his trip is labelled a ‘journal’, though the text is organised into chapters and volumes. While at one point Steven compares his writing to ‘fragments, snapshots, vague images’, he has unusually clear memories of his experiences as an eleven-year-old.

Porter wants to strike an elegiac note, but his chosen route is portentous repetition. Chapter Six opens: ‘At the beginning of August that summer – that summer I was eleven’. Two chapters later, we read: ‘When I think back on that summer now, that summer I was eleven’. Descriptions are