THE TRAVELERS

A sprawling, ambitious debut novel traces the fates of a handful
of characters, each one caught up in the lives of the others.

Eddie, a black Navy man, steals
a copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from an
officer during the Vietnam War. For the rest of his life, he carries it with
him, reciting lines. His youngest daughter, Claudia, grows up to be a
Shakespeare scholar. She marries Rufus, the white son of a philanderer, who
finds out, as an adult, that he has a half brother named Hank who grew up in
Buckner County, Georgia. Agnes is black and came from Buckner County, too, but
left after a traumatic incident on a dark road involving two white policemen
and her boyfriend. Agnes marries Eddie, the Navy man, and moves to New York.
Porter’s fantastic debut novel is a whirl of characters spidering outward
through time and space. The novel tracks a half dozen of them, all connected to
each other, more or less, in one way or another, from the 1950s through 2010.
Agnes and the thing that happened to her one night on Damascus Road form the
dark heart of the book. Everything else seems to radiate, at least
tangentially, from that. When she was a girl, Agnes’ parents took in an
almost-orphan, Eloise, with whom Agnes grows up, sharing a bedroom and,
eventually, a bed. Agnes is Eloise’s one true love, but Agnes eventually
refuses to see Eloise, and they grow distant. But this is just one of Porter’s
storylines. There are several, and while they are each gripping and vivid in
their own ways, so much action crowds the book. There isn’t enough space to get
to know the characters; put another way, there’s a distancing between the
narrator and the characters—Agnes in particular—as though they are being held
at arm’s length. We see them from the outside, not the inside, even when they
are narrating their own stories.

Beautifully written and intricately plotted, Porter’s novel
falters only when she seems to step back from her characters, to stand at the
edge of the water instead of jumping in.