The Travelers

April 15, 2019
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.

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May 20, 2019
At the emotional heart of Porter’s expansive and ambitious debut lies a particularly dark incident. A young black couple, Agnes Miller and Claude Johnson, are stopped by a pair of white police officers on a road in rural Georgia. It’s 1966, and the tragic events that ensue continue to haunt Agnes more than four decades later. Agnes is just one of more than half a dozen major characters whose often overlapping stories populate Porter’s novel, which freely ranges back and forth through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Agnes’s husband, Eddie, develops a fascination with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he has a copy of while serving in Vietnam, and their daughter, Claudia, grows up to become a Shakespeare scholar. She marries a white Joyce scholar, Rufus, whose philandering father reveals the existence of a secret half-brother late in life. Eloise, Agnes’s foster sister (and eventual lover) from her teenage years is inspired by aviator Bessie Coleman to live a bold and fearless life. These individual stories, among many others, are memorable, but the novel’s sprawling structure and abundance of narrative perspectives engender an emotional distance from all but the most stirring scenes, not to mention a lack of unifying theme or narrative arc for readers to latch onto. Virtually any of the novel’s beautifully written chapters could excel as a short story; collectively, they fall short of a fully realized novel.

May 15, 2019
Porter's electric debut is a sprawling saga that follows two interconnected American families, one Black, one white, from the 1950s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The intersections of history, race, place, and related ways of thinking play out in the characters' lives and have consequences that may not be obvious for decades. Although few characters realize it, many of the events that transpire can be traced back to the experiences Black matriarch Agnes Christie has on a Bucknor County, Georgia, road in the 1960s. The novel unfolds in a nonlinear fashion and is narrated alternately by many of its characters, while the legend established at the outset situates each major character in a larger familial context. The various points of view are valuable, yet it is difficult to get a sense of whom most characters really are. Still, readers will certainly be drawn in by Porter's sharp writing and kept hooked by the black-and-white photographs interspersed throughout the book, which give faces to the evocative voices.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)