Joe Ashby Porter's narrative style is vaguely cubist, with words often turned at slight angles to one another. But what the occasional sentence loses in textbook syntax it gains in color and sheer playfulness.

Joe Ashby Porter, All Aboard, Turtle Point Press, 2008.

On Joe Ashby Porter  Brian Evenson

In a Nutshell Joe Ashby Porter

With All Aboard, acclaimed fiction writer Joe Ashby Porter ventures into new, sometimes unprecedented territory, from the luxe restraint of “Merrymount,” through the stops-out eroticism of “Pending,” to the distilled heebie-jeebies of “Dream On.” Here, reading, travel, and sexual orientation (and disorientation) loom larger than before in Porter, and the dialogue gives new play for what Harry Mathews has called Porter’s “golden ear.” The whole collection unfolds as does each component, laying track just ahead of the speeding train of thought.


Beyond disregarding literary fashion, Joe Ashby Porter seems to inhabit his own world, producing compelling short fiction exclusively on his own terms. His latest collection contains six valuable and unique studies of connection and detachment as mediated by age, sexuality, and proximity. Though more grounded in the familiar than his previous collection, Touch Wood, an initial strangeness, both of content and style, still threatens to alienate the casual reader. Consideration, however, is rewarded.
One must first cope with Porter’s tendency for distancing the reader from the text. A dominant third-person style serves as the first barrier. Even in the two brief first-person stories, the transparency and ambiguity of the narrator resist familiarity. Further complicating things, acts and events tend to be referred to before they have been introduced, making first readings somewhat bewildering. The most significant and striking distancing technique in Porter’s arsenal, though, is his restless use of language. It sometimes seems as if he has chosen fiction as a repository for rare words and uncommon definitions of common words. Far from being rigid or formal, though, accurate rarities like “matutinal” share the page with modern truncations like “diff.” Words like “amatory” and “philately” used in casual conversation between unscholarly characters further obstruct the reader. All of these techniques -- perspective, withholding of information, and conspicuous language -- serve a style that could be judged playful or jarring with equal facility. Upon consideration, though, one can detect two functions of this initially repellent reading experience. First of all, these stories, through their inaccessibility, invite rereading, and indeed, the prose does become transparent with subsequent readings. Second, Porter’s resistance to easy immersion serves to draw attention to the pervasive theme of distance within the fictions.
Distance manifests most generally in a fondness for travel and locale, a consistent presence in Porter’s fiction; settings range from Florida to Arizona to western Africa. More important to this collection, however, are location and physical orientation and how they draw attention to separateness. Sometimes he accomplishes this formally as in “Solstice” in which two itinerant characters wander simultaneous paths throughout the American west as they find work in local theater circuits. The reader follows the characters in alternating, chronological segments bookended by the eventual intersection of their paths. On a smaller scale, the story “Dream On” is structured as an interrogation taking place amidst a vague beach resort. By setting the scene amidst people having fun by the water, Porter creates a more poignant sense of separation than would have been achieved in a cement room with just the two interrogators. On a psychological level, Porter sometimes gives access to the thoughts of characters in proximity to other characters, drawing attention to the doubt, suspicion, and disingenuousness that make connection between individuals so elusive. The result of all of this focus on simultaneity and separation is a very quiet tone. Though characters do converse, exclaim, laugh, and come into physical contact, these more conventional types of interaction are often superficial, a means of exploring separation.
Another persistent element of connection and disconnection is sexuality, a constant concern and indispensible element of human experience in this collection. Homosexuality, for instance, is a casually accepted reality, one that is recognized and dealt with by many of the characters in these stories. While the accompanying pain and confusion are occasionally acknowledged by Porter, they are not his focus. The presence of sexuality via libido and performance is more important. Lack of the former seems to push one character in “Solstice” towards ambivalence and detachment, while lack of the latter is a constant anxiety for the main character of “Pending.” Sometimes sex is fodder for conversations or encounters. In “Merrymount,” several workers discuss tactics for getting laid. In “Forgotten Coast,” a man uses the discovery of his late wife’s infidelity as an excuse to visit his estranged daughter’s family. While these stories are far from sexy, sex is a constant interest, manifesting in many interesting ways.
Ultimately, these six stories are challenging but rewarding. Despite Porter’s extremely subtle wit, their value does not lie exclusively in the momentary state caused by their being read. Read once, straight through, they prove remarkable but unmemorable. Fortunately, these stories withstand scrutiny and tighten with each reading. This reiterative satisfaction is the mark of a veteran fiction writer. While not for casual readers, this collection will satisfy and engage the serious pursuer of short fiction. - D. Richard Scannell

Joe Ashby Porter has a knack for finding life’s small moments, gilding them with flights of fancy, then letting them drift away. Sometimes he writes viscerally, as in this description of a body’s decomposition: “[Grandpa] Guo dwindles to a specimen cicada husk boxed and buried near Wanda below the frost line.” And sometimes he writes opaquely, as when old lovers reconsider each other: “Resumption should be a bodily karaoke, ready (even still) to be carried away, if just as happy with the slow and steady, old sobriquets welling up, thigh across thigh, tasting.” All Aboard, Porter’s fourth volume of stories, toggles between these styles. Not unlike his previous collection, Touch Wood (2002), happenstance and sexual disorientation play key roles in characters’ lives, and as he did in The Near Future (2006), his third novel, Porter puts a droll spin on aging: Two of the meatier stories, “Solstice” and “Forgotten Coast,” take place on the birthdays of middle-aged men.

“Solstice” presents a portrait of forty-five-year-old Gooding Knowles, a “lapsed thespian and a wind farmer” living alone on his family’s Wyoming homestead. An aids survivor for twenty-four “bonus” years, Gooding has lived through the initial crisis in the ’80s, the agitations for legalizing gay marriage in the ’90s, and the hate murder of Matthew Shepard in nearby Laramie. Running parallel to his story is that of Penny St. Clair, a wayward concert-lighting specialist, whom he met in a regional theater company. When Penny shows up at Gooding’s door years later, Porter captures the strangeness of the moment as “each struggles to bridge the trembling gulf that yawns between the remembered face swathed in flattering retrospect and the naked one here lined and hollowed.” A strain of loneliness permeates this story, as it does the book as a whole, but in this instance Porter gives the reader a strong sense of a friendship lost and found, of two loners with “no obligations,” who can live together “side by side like civilized rural neighbors out here in the wind.”

In “Forgotten Coast,” Lou Grable, a computer programmer, celebrates his fifty-fifth birthday by taking a trip to his long-lost daughter’s house in Florida, intending to confess a discovery about his dead wife “that’s stood my very existence on its head.” As it happens, Lucy is out of town, so he meets Floyd, her husband, and Walter, her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome. Nevertheless, he needs to talk to someone, feeling “like a reincarnation of the mariner in the old poem, driven to divulge.” Finding an eager listener in Floyd, he recounts the courtship of his wife and the shock he felt at discovering on her laptop that as “Gingerbread Girl” she had been having a long-standing affair with “Trinket,” a woman. Although Lou never talks with Lucy, he does bond with his grandson, and they banter candidly about “normals” and “Aspies.” Yet when he leaves for his flight home, nothing’s changed. As he does in “Solstice,” which closes with Gooding hang gliding, Porter depicts a loner for a short period before sending him off into the atmosphere.

The mood in these stories is always changing: Nostalgia shifts into soft-core sex, and plainspoken language segues into dreamy lyricism. At times, the diction jaywalks brazenly, producing delicious turns of phrase (“ivy-sighing,” “a pang of roses”). Porter conveys the feel of an entire life in a tight morsel: “Penny follows a path of least resistance through school and junior college, cheerfully friendless, luckless with her business diploma, and scrapes by in a greater Oklahoma City Nehi bottling plant, three hairnets in eight years, cultivating her whittling hobby evenings and weekends.” Readers may experience these lives vividly, but the characters aren’t the sort that stick in your mind.

At its best, Porter’s wordplay suggests Kathryn Davis’s; his descriptions of gay life could be Dennis Cooper’s with the lights turned low, more easy listening than punk. But the author’s opacity can be maddening: In “Dream On,” a transvestite and her young accomplice interrogate a man to elicit an “anecdote” (about a child being stung by a wasp)—then, it seems, murder him by chainsaw. The scary, fablelike atmosphere, which presumably represents the complicated sex lives of these characters, dissolves into mumbo jumbo: “Complicity floats free in the eye of the inquisitor. Kiki with her awkward Adam’s apple and saurian Koshal themselves could qualify, if only by virtue of this matutinal outing, the tray of pliers and drill bits that may never before have seen the light of day.” After the anecdote is revealed comes the sophomoric coda: “The moral? Must anecdotes have them? . . . Do morals have morals? When is a moral not a moral? Do chickens have lips?”

While “Dream On” is decidedly unconventional, in “Pending” Porter relies too heavily on familiar flirtations. Fifty-nine-year-old Eric is a reference librarian with a waning libido and an extensive collection of “phalli, obsidian, teak, porcelain . . . triumphantly erect if somewhat beneath ‘life’ size.” He was once married, but now he maintains a long-distance relationship with a Japanese man. A lengthy build-up to a sauna encounter with a well-endowed stranger brings Eric’s soft-core imaginings to fruition, but the scene is clichéd, as if drawn from a Calvin Klein poster: “As Eric steals a rightward glance, moving only eyes, he sees that, while Charlie continues to gaze straight ahead as if daydreaming, his abs tighten.”

Despite their sometimes provocative subject matter, these stories are genteel. Porter is a desultory storyteller, snatching a character’s essence, then letting it go. This Zen-like approach has its appeal, but if there are truths lurking within these tales, they aren’t to be found on the page. - Lenora Todaro

Joe Ashby Porter, The Near Future, Turtle Point Press, 2006.

excerpt

"The Near Future is a little jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting—among other things—old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination is of the truly droll sort, and with it he homes very closely in upon the truth—alas."—Richard Ford

Porter imagines a slightly off-kilter tomorrow in his latest novel (after Touch Wood), about a zany cast of character who shake up a dozy trailer-park retirement village in Manatee, Florida. After five decades of marriage, devoted housewife Lillian Margiotta walks out on her husband Vince, a retired Brooklyn cabby and unrepentant philanderer. Although Vince still hopes to win back Lillian, he goes on a road trip to Key West with a new lady friend, spinster Vola Byrd (a once-powerful but now-impoverished Manhattan realtor), his granddaughter Denise and her boyfriend, Tink, the latter a pair of smart-mouthed grifters hoping to strike it rich with a pyramid scheme. Meanwhile, back in Manatee, Lillian visits with Memphis transplants Brent and Gwen Runkle, who pine for the daughter they haven't seen in years and fret over an "OIDs" epidemic. Porter's intimate depictions of the betrayals and regrets of aging-particularly for women-are moving. But he clouds these flashes of humanity with overly artful prose ("Lillian...blots a fuchsia moue on lilac tissue she then lets eddy through a careless somersault into a receptacle of stiffened lace") and wacky plotting (e.g. an incident with a gun-toting Gertrude Stein at a Hemingway look-alike contest). - Publishers Weekly

Denise and her boyfriend are on their way to Key West to put a pyramid scheme into action, but first they stop to visit her grandparents in Manatee, a Florida retirement village. Her grandfather, Vince, shows them around, and when the "Library" turns out to be a "cocoon of hologram screens," readers' suspicions that this is a speculative work are affirmed. Denise is also confronted with the unexpected: her grandparents have separated. Vince decides to join Denise and Tink on their risky quest, and brings along the delectably self-possessed Lola. The mismatched quartet finds quite a carnival in Key West, what with Hemingway and Gertrude Stein look-alikes, Deadheads, Trolls, steroid-pumped drug dealers, and the blue-spotted victims of the latest plague. As his cheerfully roguish characters speak a charmingly tough argot, and brassily navigate the dangers of a teeming, high-tech, lawless world, Porter--a mordant wit and acclaimed stylist in the mode of George Saunders and Kathryn Davis--concocts a hilarious blend of the plausible and the futuristic in a cleverly rambunctious tale of love refused and love won. - Donna Seaman
 

SWEET and fey, Joe Ashby Porter's new novel describes a world many readers contemplating their twilight years will want to inhabit. Fictional Manatee, Fla., is a town where the weather is warm, necessities are reasonably priced and life is not only entertaining but even a little sexy. Or, in the case of the main character, Vincent Margiotta, more than a little sexy. One year shy of his 80th birthday, Vince stays in shape by, as he puts it, "consoling the random widow," his indifferent wife, Lillian, notwithstanding.
As the title suggests, the action in "The Near Future" takes place in a brave new world of sorts, though it's not all that different from ours. This isn't hard-core science fiction, just conventional storytelling ratcheted up a notch. There are a couple of fancy gadgets that haven't been patented yet and an alarming new disease on the horizon, but nothing Porter's gaggle of spunky old-timers can't handle. Of course, there is the little matter of certain historical figures popping up unexpectedly, but what's the point of getting old if you can't enjoy the occasional surprise?
Life in Manatee does become a bit ruffled when Vince's granddaughter, Denise, shows up with her dim-bulb boyfriend, Tink, whom she met when he tried to rob the convenience store where she worked. Abandoning violent crime — though not crime, and certainly not stupidity — Tink is now involved in a hopelessly outdated chain-letter scam. Along with Vince and one of his lady friends, a 68-year-old who sometimes does her gardening naked, the two young lovebirds set out for Key West, where, miraculously, the scheme somehow works — either because the drug traffickers are desperate to launder their money or because they simply have so much of it they can afford to take a chance on Tink's dubious promises.
Porter's narrative style is vaguely cubist, with words often turned at slight angles to one another. But what the occasional sentence loses in textbook syntax it gains in color and sheer playfulness. Here is Vince's lady friend coming in from the garden and sitting on the edge of her bed: "Clum, sounds an empty boot on gray pine almost petrified with age, clum the other, flackle flackle the pair as Vola's naked heels hustle them under." A bit later, she hears a noise outside and looks through her window: "Pottle pottle wheeze, around Vola's gatepost and up her driveway chugs an unfamiliar coupe the very color of the flaming sky."
If these resonances recall the bohemian phrasings of Djuna Barnes rather than the straight-ahead sentences of Ernest Hemingway, there may be a good reason. The travelers arrive in Key West during a street festival (which is a little like saying they visited the Arctic Circle when it was cold) and, of course, Hemingway impersonators abound. But there's also a Gertrude Stein impersonator, wielding a gun. (Not without cause, since some of the Papas, as the Hemingway impersonators are called, are trying to shoot her.) Masquerades being what they are, there's also a Fidel, a Winnie Mandela, an Imelda Marcos, a Tammy Faye Bakker and a Yasir Arafat, though there are hints that some of them might be the genuine article. No wonder, then, that when Tink is asked if he's real or virtual, the best he can come up with is a bewildered "Er. . . ."
"The Near Future" is an exceedingly odd book yet also, despite the gunplay, a genuinely endearing one. And if you think things aren't going to end happily, then you don't know your Geriatric Sun Belt Sci-Fi Lite. Even Denise and Tink seem to get the message: as long as you arrive home in one piece, a little trip through time and space just makes your double-wide trailer look that much cozier. - David Kirby

Joe Ashby Porter's intriguing, meticulously constructed realm called Manatee, a retirement village in Gulf-coast Florida, unfurls in The Near Future's opening pages to reveal a swampy, overheated milieu both familiar and strange. "Blinking lights whiz along the freeway, palm fronds and hibiscus, egrets and ruined haciendas and blue electronic jungles," Porter writes, describing a highway between Manatee and Miami. Determining exactly when the action in the novel takes place presents an interesting question.
In The Near Future, a new sexually transmitted disease called OIDS has developed, which afflicts sufferers with blue spots and robotic speech tics, and AIDS has been vanquished. A population explosion has jammed even sleepy back alleys of south Florida. The Internet is no more, victim of a meltdown. "Virts," or virtual worlds, are available with the ease of running a living-room film projector. Libraries have been outlawed because computers and virtual worlds made hard copy obsolete, leaving them to devolve into havens for the homeless. In the future, Porter's world warns, petty crime will rise and people will travel less—a depressing result of routine car bombings.
With a close eye for detail enlivening his narrative, Porter, who is also known as professor Joseph A. Porter in Duke's English department, offers a window into the lives of a small set of characters during a few days set in Manatee and on a road trip to Key West. Placing his characters in neat trailers on Manatee's flowering lanes, he introduces us to Gwen and Brent Runkles, whose adult daughter has abandoned them, and their friends, Vince and Lillian Margiotta, all of whom are in their seventies. Before the novel opens, though, Lillian walked out on Vince, and he's been speedily picked up by a fetching spinster named Vola Byrd. Completing the cast, Denise Passaro, the Margiottas' granddaughter, who is in her twenties, arrives from Baltimore in a sporty coupe with Tink Quinn, her boyfriend.
Hyperreality, here, is tethered to actual events. 9/11 cost Vola a lucrative New York real-estate career; during Vince's childhood, hanging laundry air-dried in Brooklyn; Brent fought in Korea. These grandparents show sensibilities from 1950s suburbia, and their grandchildren a post-millennial insouciance; baby-boomers, interestingly, are absent. To focus on fixing Manatee at a spot in time, though, is to miss the point. The characters' relationships—between spouses, children, lovers, neighbors, strangers at a bus stop—shape its narrative arc. Each of these funny, truculent individuals seems to be seeking something, though the haphazard, comical nature of that search is foreshadowed early, when Denise (Neesy) misstates the explorer who sought Florida's fountain of youth: "Corleone," she says.
In The Near Future, opportunism thrives. Neesy and Tink, who met when he attempted to rob a convenience store where she worked, are in Florida to launch a pyramid scheme. Vola, whose interest in Vince peaks around mealtimes because she's always strapped for cash, shoplifts cheap bracelets at a souvenir shop. Vince has damaged his marriage with affair after affair, but remains dumbfounded that the behavior would ultimately alienate his wife.
Stymied by repeated efforts to win Lillian back, Vince travels with Neesy and Tink to Key West, and Vola rides along. Wandering around Key West, now a major drug-trade port—crack, yes, but geriatric contraband like memory drugs and hair tonics, too—the characters meet a string of odd people. Vince wanders into Hemingway's house and finds himself the target of a gonzo drug-world assassin.
Here, the novel's storyline becomes a bit confusing—a dozy Florida sojourn turned dangerous by a criminal undercurrent. Porter writes with ruthless efficiency, paring his images to a few stark words, to lasting effect, and he applies a similar economy to his characters' dialogue, but as the action escalates, punchy banter between them sometimes blends into a glib blur. Missed connections between the characters also build tension, but it's a relief when the four Key West adventurers pile back into the car and rehash events. The most harrowing scenes for Vince happen away from the other characters, and are only described by him on their way back to Manatee.
Florida's inherent surrealism, fast-forwarded and steeped in an irreverent retiree worldview, gives latitude to Porter's talent for fiction. Porter, the professor, also creeps in occasionally—when, for example, it's noted that scholarship on Hemingway's sexism is outdated. A tumultuous street-fair scene, with identity mix-ups and peopled by Hemingway look-alikes, also bespeaks elements of Shakespearean comedy.
The near future, as it happens, may be only a few years away, or it may exist even now, an alternate reality, with the help of virtual electronics. "I wonder," says Lillian, "why time has to be real in a virtual world," her question perhaps a wink from the writer about fiction's very construct. Freed of the question, a reader examines the complication and pathos of growing old still enlivened by heartache and hopefulness. —Lauren Porcaro

In his novel The Near Future, Joe Ashby Porter manages to practice realism and surrealism at the same time. Sometimes he achieves this version of Empson's seventh type of ambiguity by choosing his settings carefully. From what he writes, seconded by Don Justice's gravely beautiful poems about childhood in Florida, I infer that certain neighborhoods in a Gulf coast retirement village, or Miami, or Key West exhibit brightly colored phantasmagoria and juxtapositions weird enough to satisfy the appetites of Andre Breton, and then one has only to record them. Porter is aided in this reportage by his superb eye (and ear) for detail. Sometimes he achieves the ambiguity by superposition. During the crucial middle scenes of his novel, the characters move in a landscape that is simultaneously the real world (as we like to call it) and an afterworld / underworld whose mafiosi are famous dead people. His strategy is not that of magical realism, where the uncanny emerges unremarked into a seamless reality; instead, the realms of the living and the dead occur in tense opposition, superimposed but not reconciled and ultimately not explained either. When it is all over, we don't know whether Hemingway himself presided at the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest that caps Key West's Papa Week, or how his pals Ava Gardner and Fidel Castro managed to show up there.
I bet five dollars that Joe Ashby Porter spends a good deal of time in Florida. Either he takes lots of pictures or he has a photographic memory, for the backdrops in his tale of love lost and regained and lost again are deliciously evocative. He also does voices, and not only voices but sounds: he is probably the most onomatopoetic novelist I have ever read. The alienated and ancient lovebirds in his story are Vincent and Lillian Margiotta; we find out on the first page that Vince has been straying from the marriage for decades and that at long last, after they'd retired together from New York City to Manatee, Florida, Lillian has finally decided to leave him. The issue doesn't seem to be so much his lack of fidelity as her wish to spend some time alone, to decide what kind of pickles she likes to buy at the grocery store and where she wants to be buried. Here is a glimpse into the double-wide trailer of her erstwhile neighbors, Gwen and Brent, who distract themselves by building clocks that run backwards and mourning for their grown-up daughter who ran away from home.
From the powder room trills a last Tyrolean woodnote. Silent in their wide bed, hands clasped under the sheet, the Runkles take heart. Across the wheat shag carpet, the blonde and pastel settee in its polyethylene slipcover, the quilted control panels, the vintage cell phone on its tasseled cushion, and across the Runkles, light increases by insensible degrees, relentlessly.
And here is a glimpse of Key West, to which Vincent and his current flame Vola, a once successful and now ruined Manhattan real estate agent, have been carried off by Vince's granddaughter Denise and her hoodlum boyfriend Tink in search of wealthy yet shady partners for a pyramid scheme.
In luminous shade under ficus and palms leaning over stucco walls and cactus and pink, yellow, and red hibiscus, he passes trellises and peeling gingerbread, sawgrass, yellow thryallis and allamanda, purple oleander, tangerine ixora and heliconia, stiff bird-of-paradise blooms, strings of Christmas lights, hovering dragonflies, sky-blue porch ceilings, and a wall made of bottles. He [Vincent] sees few people and hears no voices except when an infant laughs in an airy bedroom above, and when a woman sings a muffled " Comparsita" on a radio on a table in an empty garden.
Denise and Tink talk like dyslexic Baltimore street people (though clearly Neesy is smart and deserves an education); Vincent and Lillian sound like the first-generation Italian Americans in Moonstruck; and Gwen and Brent comfort each other in the dulcet tones of born-again Christians on television. They are haunting characters,
all so peculiar that the reader can't figure out why they are so touching and memorable. Perhaps it is because they struggle mightily with the unsolvable problems life has imposed on them, using the very limited resources they have at their disposal, and yet still manage to have a little fun. Right in the middle of the story Vincent is shot to death by a Gertrude Stein look-alike, who thinks that he and his niece and her fiance are honing in on her territory; or he isn't. The whole last half of the novel can be read on the first hypothesis, and then again on the second, and both ways (I tried them) it makes sense. Because Porter never tells you what the ontological status of his hero finally is, the counterpoint between the two readings creates very strange effects.
The scene where Vincent is shot on a park bench in Key West illustrates nicely Porter's ability to make his scene immediate by details of sight, sound, smell, touch. In this scene, the record of " uninterpreted sense data" is dramatically apt, because the hero really doesn't know what they mean until it is too late.
As he is about to sit, the trunk of the adjacent tree makes a loud thwock. How's that? Vince leans to read the label, " Gumbo-limbo, Bursera simaruba." Thwock, thwock, from the trunk just above his head, and a sudden fragrance of resin. Gumbo-limbo? Wait, those holes in the bark... thwoonk, at the end of a fresh track ploughed in the wood, what appears to be a bullet.
Just afterwards, alive or dead, Vincent steals a moped, which stalls out, gasless, on a causeway through the middle of a salt marsh outside the city. As he tries to hide his transportation in a canebrake, a crowd of strangers (alive or dead?) approaches Vince and offers him half a gallon of gas. His friends are the Trolls: Fidel, Jimmy and Arafat, Winnie, Maggie, Imelda and Tammy Faye; the rival gang apparently is the Deadheads.
' " Deadheads?" Asks Vince.
Fidel says, " Groupies for the Neo-dead, hermano."
Vince smiles. " You're still drawing a blank, partner."
" You must've heard of them," calls Jimmy from Margaritaville.
" They've been cranking out space jam, oldies, all sorts of easy listening since before you were born."
" Fans troop about the country after them," explains Maggie. " For decades their appearances have only been announced by jungle telegraph, so to speak."
" Ze 'Eds crawl from woodwork," continues Jacques-Yves. " Sometime ze band make ze gig, sometime no. Ze 'Eds, zay remain mellow regardless." '
He sounds just like Jacques Cousteau, but is he a revenant or a celebrity guest appearance? Is the Grateful Dead the rockband or a roaming band of zombies? Is Vincent near the Key West airport, or on the Other Side? The reader has to entertain both possibilities, and although by the end Porter has told us a lot about " what happened" to the characters, he never lets us in on the big secret. Here are the very last lines of The Near Future, uttered by some Manatee senior citizens: " Come to think of it, didn't old Vince set sail coupla weeks ago? Margiotta? Nahh, he'll outlive us all. You must have somebody else in mind." I don't think Empson ever imagined that his seventh type of ambiguity could be realized for the length of half a novel; it is hard enough to hold together contradictory readings for a single phrase or passage. This novel is thus a most peculiar but brilliant tour de force; it is, as Neesy would say, unique. - Emily Grosholz



Joe Ashby Porter, Touch Wood: Short Stories, Turtle Point Press, 2002.
 
Touch Wood acknowledges the sway of chance and contingency in our lives without entailing any facile despair. The gesture indeed manifests the guarded hope underpinning even the bleakest passages of these ten variously innovative fictions from Joe Ashby Porter's past decade. Now grave, now twinkling with sly humor, the stories range across the United States from Key West to Alaska, and about the Mediterranean in Tunisia, Spain, and southern France. Only the fifth book of fiction, and only the third collection of short stories in a distinguished career reaching back a quarter century, Touch Wood presents Porter, who John Hawkes called "an American original, " at the height of his powers.


Porter (Eelgrass; Resident Aliens) brings his distinctive style to a variety of odd situations in these 10 stories, which often end up in literary destinations far from their point of origin. The collection begins amusingly with "A Man Wanted to Buy a Cat," which features a man so smitten with a milliner's cat that he contemplates kidnapping it, even though his spouse is extremely allergic to the species. "Schrekx and Son" is a sort of sexual rite of passage, as a Parisian father passes on some rather disquieting information about marriage and dating to his son, who, at 31, is just beginning to dip his toes into the mating pool. "A Pear-Shaped Woman and a Fuddy Duddy" is a delightfully weird exercise in which protagonists Lucille and Elmer descend upon Biloxi for a "character festival" and begin arcane interrogations of the locals, until the focus shifts to an in-depth discussion of smells with other festivalgoers. In "Scrupulous Am‚d‚e," the author effectively narrates the mysterious romances and illnesses of a French lighthouse keeper, although the extended format comes close to stretching his prose tricks to the limit. Porter's tendency to deliver elliptical, down-to-earth renderings of his character's inner lives may be an acquired taste, but his agile mind and unusual take on even the most mundane elements of people's daily routines make this a challenging but constantly entertaining read. As Porter puts it in the title story: "Deep perplexity gathers to a wave. Good comes of it." - Publishers Weekly

This third collection of stories from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Kentucky Stories offers us a mixture of realistic and fabulist fictions, all of them reflecting Porter's keen sense of the unusual and the ironic in the everyday. The title story tells of (improbable) consequences following a missed phone connection between a woman and her lover and then tells the story of that story's impact on various people, with great or unfortunate consequences, alternately. The remarkable "Bone Key" shows life in Key West through the eyes of a sidewalk hair wrapper, attuning himself to the sensibilities of assorted clients and curious "passersby covered in jangling idiosyncrasies" and reflecting on his day job at IBM and the layoffs he must make there. This character's perspective counters, perhaps at least partly, the "illusion of sightlessness" that spectators and performers alike find appealing. Porter is effective at using quite long sentences to plunge us fully into his character's worlds, at elaborating whole scenarios or background stories in a single sentence, and at ironic, fablelike endings, as in "A Man Wanted to Buy a Cat." - James O'Laughlin

A slim but varied and accomplished third collection from a Pulitzer-nominee (The Kentucky Stories, 1983, not reviewed; Eelgrass, 1977, etc.).

Porter’s tales here are like modern art. As often as they demand meaning they question the relevance of it. And they are never about any one thing: a story that seems to be set in a French prison might suddenly become a lecture on the predictability of waves, or a couple’s encounter with a pseudo-pirate might lead into a discussion of 1950s crooners, or a story might be entirely and literally cerebral, as in “In the Mind.” The challenge is that there’s nothing simple: “A Man Wanted to Buy a Cat” is a weird, poetic episode about a man who covets his neighbor’s cat, but it’s really about rediscovering the pleasure of family; the fast-forward feel of Native American lives in “Naufrage and Diapason” simulates the choppy, disappearing wake of the ship of opportunity where we are told, “What is life after all but a piece of stretched meat? The story ratchets along regardless.” A lengthy and moving biography of a lighthouse operator on the Tunisian island of La Galite comes in “Scrupulous Amedee,” while the occasion of a hair-wrap in Key West (“Bone Key”) becomes an explanation of that odd town’s sensibility and a portrait of its underworld. “A Pear-Shaped Woman and a Fuddy-Duddy” begins a more self-aware movement in the stories, with characters attending a “character festival” in which they search for memorable characters in Mississippi only to reveal that they themselves are memorable. And the title piece, which closes the volume, is a series of random semi-stories injected with rhetoric on the effect of modern storytelling.
Smart, hard, and rewarding. - Kirkus Reviews

 

Joe Ashby Porter, Resident Aliens. New Amsterdam Books, 2000.

In the mid-seventies four adults from beyond their national borders find themselves marooned in Jeffersonian academic Charlottesville, Virginia: the journalist Iréne and her professor husband Jean-Luc, both French; Chantal, a graduate student from Montréal; and Mouse, an Oneida Quebecoise. Set in their house in the country, Resident Aliens culminates in a festive weekend of comical blunders, shifting allegiances, and maturing love. Joe Ashby Porter continues his series of cultural core samples from the path that led here, advancing past the sixties ebullience of his Eelgrass into the truer and more concentrated edginess of the seventies.

 

 

Joe Ashby Porter, Lithuania: Short Stories. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

The author of "Eelgrass" and "The Kentucky Stories" now offers a collection of "mysterious and beautiful" (Lee Smith) stories, "as subtle, syntactically graceful, and beautiful as any I've seen" (Toby Olson).

In stories set in such diverse places as Tunisia, Quebec and Baltimore, Porter ( The Kentucky Stories ) conjures up quirky, gritty characters and surrounds them with evocative swatches of local color. The stories meander along, with no startling plot developments but with a delightfully wry realism. In "Basse Ville," a crusty old Canadian coot who fancies himself a painter searches for Sinbad, his missing parrot, and reflects on life, death and his wife ("What the hell, wonders of the universe probably only matter to you if you're about to kick off, so maybe it's all to the good for your wife not to bat an eye at them"). "West Baltimore" is the story of fat, semi-toothless Margaret, with her childhood memories, her present-day gossip and her fears that she will be evicted from her apartment as the neighborhood gentrifies. The only weak link in this excellent collection is "Attention, Shoppers," an overly arch riff on consumerism in the far future. But even this piece has its droll moments ("When I first slid my toots into those beauts Big Bird shoes and slid across the permaseal I felt more serene than Goethe ice-skating in the old picture") - Publishers Weekly

 

Joe Ashby Porter, The Kentucky Stories. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Joe Ashby Porter, Eelgras. W. W. Norton & Co., 1977.        

 

 

read it at Google Books

 

Born in a coal mining town in western Kentucky, Joe Ashby Porter has had a career of distinction. From his days at Harvard to the publication of his first novel, Eelgrass, and winning the prestigious Pushcart Prize for short fiction, Porter's writing has shown remarkable creative scope. His characters are refreshingly original, yet honest and human, and their stories are told in a style that is at once luminous and subdued. His latest novel, Resident Aliens, was published last September.

Along with fiction, Porter publishes Shakespeare criticism under the pseudonym Joseph A. Porter. He offers both his talents to the Duke community, teaching creative writing and Shakespeare courses in the English department.

Tell me about the short story you'll be reading.

It will appear in the Kenyon Review and it's entitled Scrupulous Amédee. It's the life story of a man born on an island off of the coast of Tunisia. He spends most of his life on the island, and the story takes him all the way to his death and then a little bit after.... He has a somewhat difficult life; he's scrupulous inasmuch as he attempts to play honorably with the cards he's dealt. He's dealt a very strange hand of cards, including what he believes to be the ability to hear supernatural voices.
In a scene in Resident Aliens (set in the mid-'70s) four undergraduates show up at a party held by the main characters, one of whom is their professor, and smoke some marijuana. Do you think that was possible back then, and could such a scene take place today?
It's a somewhat realistic portrayal.... It's a bit exaggerated-some of the characters do a bit more exaggerated versions of things than I remember being the case back then. I don't think something like that could happen today.
How do you balance your roles as both a scholar and writer?
It's not easy. At the beginning, I balanced them by keeping them separate from each other. Now they stay separate without having to keep them separate.... In the beginning, I thought there might be professional difficulty. Shakespearians might think I couldn't be a serious Shakespearian; fiction readers might think I couldn't be a serious novelist because I was committed to doing Shakespeare.

Why did you create a pseudonym for yourself?

I published fiction before I published scholarly work. My given name is Joe Ashby Porter.... When I first published scholarly work, it seemed to me that "Joe Ashby Porter" didn't sound professional enough, so I created a pseudonym for myself: Joseph A. Porter.
Resident Aliens is about French characters, and critics describe it as a very French novel. Would you describe yourself as a Francophile?
I would. I have a work in progress that's a kind of memoir. Its working title is Deep France, and it's about the connection between myself and France that goes back almost as far as I can remember. Even in my youth, in a lost little town in Kentucky, I was interested in France. But my most important anchor is Yves Orvoen. He and I have lived together for 30 years.... Because of him, I go back to France very often.... So yes, I'm very Francophile.
I can't imagine what it must have been like growing up in western Kentucky. I guess you must have been quite an anomaly.
I was an anomaly, maybe quite an anomaly, but I also liked people. I knew how to make myself seem not so anomalous. Maybe my friends thought of me as slightly bookwormish, but in general they thought I was one of the guys.
Resident Aliens relies on the dramatization of everyday events. How do you turn everyday life into a work of art?

The language in which you tell ordinary events, in my view, has to be even better than if you were telling extraordinary events.... For a page to make an invitation to a reader, the writer has to have weighed every single word, every single phrase.

Does teaching writing impact your style?

I learn a whole lot from students' writing-a lot of it is good. I learn by watching students do things I have never thought of doing. In a way my best model for any kind of artist is Shakespeare. He was a complete sort of magpie; he would steal right and left.... I'm a shameless kind of thief from anything I read; a lot of the thievery is unconscious, though. I suppose I steal things like the tone of a student's story; I might use it without even knowing how it was created.

Is Duke a good atmosphere for a writer?

The Duke English department is an extremely nurturing place for fiction writers and poets.... There is no division at all between creative writers and scholars. We support each other, we understand each other. Duke is the only place that makes this kind of thing possible, and I'm very thankful to have landed here. - Jonas Blank  March 2, 2001