Book Review: Regina Porter’s “The Travelers”

The Travelers by Regina Porter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First, I agree with many other reviewers that the book reads like a series of short stories, and I would go as far as to conjecture that is what many of these chapters were before given connective tissue as a multi-generational family saga.

In scene, I believe the characterizations are very strong and get better as the book moves forward. The Viet Nam veteran’s affinity for “Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead” felt clunky, but for the most part, Ms. Porter does a really nice job maintaining a sense of authenticity among a wide variety of characters and their locales: Long Island Jews, wealthy Southerners, hippies at Venice Beach, etc.

I appreciate that the book is attempting an idiosyncratic structure, although it is difficult by the end of the book to identify how and where it comes together as a whole, particularly in the final chapters. The incident that begins the story, a near-drowning of a child and a subsequent injury to the elderly James Vincent, smartly introduces the theme of families, or communities, struggling to maintain their integrity. However, although that is a thread carried throughout the novel, the lack of resolution by the end of the novel is frustrating.

Although the book crescendos with a heightening of drama, from a violent and suicidal ex-husband to a critical meeting of half-brothers and their mixed-race families, the book’s final chapters land with a thud. One of the few characters who we see as both a teenager and (cynical) adult, Hank Camphor, is offered ironically touching salvation in the form of a dog he essentially steals from an obnoxious cousin. But then he later makes a pass at his brother’s wife in clumsy fashion and while it felt appropriate for the characters, it’s place in the story is awkward and discomfiting. It is one thing not to give your cast of characters easy narrative arcs; it’s another to just hang them out to dry.

On a similar note, I found it very perplexing that the book essentially ends with an old woman’s chance encounter with the policeman who raped her. He offers her a slice of pie and if there is some broader meaning behind why Ms. Porter chose to end her book here, it is opaque.

While I wouldn’t say the flat conclusion ruined the book for me, it does dull what is a mostly poignant look at the shape of American society in the last half of the twentieth century. I hope that Ms. Porter continues to play around with narrative form in future novels but finds a way to more artfully bring it home.

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