Adrift in the Suburbs

‘Imiss Mary and the children. I hear their voices upstairs,” John Cheever wrote in his journal in the summer of 1952. “I come back here every year to work hard and establish my independence from them, but never really leave them, and away from them I feel maimed and foolish.” He was at Treetops in Bristol, N.H., a family retreat where he went to write. “The idea is to get away from one place, but I never get away, I never reach another place,” he lamented.

Cheever felt perpetually unmoored. His journals reveal an Episcopal melancholy; a man aware of the spirit, of the potential beauty of life, but tinged “with deep sadness” over the fact that “I am not young anymore, that I have suffered some losses and am not content.” Colm Tóibín has noted: “​​The tone in Cheever’s journals was usually self-pitying and humourless. In the stories, however, he could turn domestic despair into comedy and then back again, often in a single phrase.” Such an observation is perhaps both accurate and unfair. All writers of fiction must risk being maudlin in order to reach true sentiment, and often one’s private words are the proving ground for public stories.

The Disappeared, a new story collection by Andrew Porter, seems suffused with the feeling evoked in Cheever’s journals. Porter, 51, debuted in 2008 with a story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Next came In Between Days, a 2012 novel about a divorced couple and their struggling children. In The Disappeared, Porter doesn’t write of Cheever’s Northeast — the stories are primarily set in Texas — but he does write of the suburbs. His characters often have a glass of wine in the evening and sit in silence, as if they want to cling to the disappearing days.

A short-story collection, like a book of poems, holds curious tensions. Poems and short stories are forms that thrive in the world of literary magazines — often quarterly publications that are perhaps most frequently read by their contributors and aspiring writers — and gathering them together in a book can pose challenges. I hope I’m not being too heretical when I say that even modern masters of the short story such as Cheever, Andre Dubus, and Flannery O’Connor had weaker tales among the classics. That alone is not enough to sully the worth of a book of stories; it would be akin to faulting an entire novel for a slow scene or a moment of frivolous exposition.

A book of short stories is well suited to melancholy; with each ending, marked by pages of white space, we transition to new lives, new moments. The brevity of the form places significant narrative pressure on the writer, and the best writers of short fiction tap into a transcendent power, illuminating the lives of characters beyond the first and final pages.

Porter appears to have taken to heart Anton Chekhov’s dictum that in short fiction “one must write about simple things.” In doing so, the writer focuses on one character, “puts him on the canvas and paints him alone,” and then “scatters” other characters like “small coins, and the result is something like the vault of heaven: one big moon and a number of very small stars around it.”

“Bees” starts with a bee infestation of a family’s detached garage. They sting Alexis, the narrator’s wife, and the couple calls a beekeeper to investigate. He makes quick work of it, “taking out a part of the drywall, then using this vacuum device to suck the bees into a large wood box.” They are released outside San Antonio, “where, he assured us, the bees would prosper.” The beekeeper tells the couple that the honeycomb that remains inside the walls also has to be removed; otherwise bees will return the following year. It is an expensive and tedious process. The beekeeper will have to open and clean the walls, insulate them, and then close them up. The narrator says yes, but not now; “it’s not the best time.” The reason: “We had just begun what Alexis was now referring to as our trial separation. She’d moved into an apartment downtown, closer to her job, and during the week she sometimes slept there in the evenings.”

Later in the story, the narrator says: “Alexis had assured me that she had no intention of divorcing me. She said that she was doing this to strengthen our marriage, to strengthen herself. She’d fallen into a pretty dark place lately, she said, and now she was trying her best to get out of it.” Porter’s first-person speakers are quite easy to settle into — there’s not a single story in this collection that feels inauthentic or belabored — and in tales like “Bees,” we feel as if the stories themselves are affirmations of grief. “Bees” doesn’t end well for the couple.

Porter’s stories are restrained, and elegant in their controlled sentences. He writes beautifully of sound, as in “Cello”:

I heard the shower go off on the other side of the house, and then a few minutes later I heard some music go on, not classical music, the music that Natalie had been trained in and devoted her life to, the music that had filled every apartment and every house we’d ever lived in, but Bessie Smith, a newfound love, a rich and soulful presence in our lives these days.

Francine Prose has said that a story “creates its own world” that holds “clear or mysterious correspondences to our own, a world in which we are too involved to keep track of what anyone is learning.” The Disappeared has many such mysterious correspondences.

Scattered among the longer pieces are very short works, in the style of Jayne Anne Phillips’s seminal collection Black Tickets. In “Chili,” the narrator remembers a time when he lived in San Antonio next to an artist named Teresa who kept a garden of chili peppers in her backyard, “some very obscure, some strange hybrids” of New Mexico and Texas varieties. She’d present them to visitors, narrating the stories of each. One night, there was “the hottest pepper she’d ever grown, a unique hybrid of a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion and something else.” People drank beer, talked, and ate the other peppers but left that one. Teresa would be diagnosed with breast cancer a year later and die a year after that — but the narrator hangs on that memory of her at the table, “staring at her beautiful red pepper, as if it were the child she’d never had, or a painting she’d always wanted to make, this tiny, beautiful thing, so full of heat it might kill you.”

Although Porter’s stories are dramatically subdued, he has a preternatural sense of how anxiety controls domestic life, especially that of parents. “Austin” begins at a party in Westlake Hills, an Austin suburb. The narrator goes outside for a moment and finds “a group of my old friends sitting around a fire pit in the backyard, smoking cigarettes.” He notices that they “had managed to preserve their youth, while I had given in to the widening waistline, the boat shoes, the gray hair in my beard.”

The conversation focuses on a recent incident: A friend of a friend had “come home one night to find an intruder in his house.” The man rushed the intruder “not realizing he was a kid, and all pumped up on adrenaline, he’d somehow managed to kill him by ramming his head into the doorway of the bathroom.” Outside, among the smoke from the fire and the cigarettes, the reunited friends are talking about whether the death should be considered self-defense or murder.

The narrator thinks: “What I wanted to say was that I’d somehow lost sight of how to discern things like right and wrong and that when it came to matters like murder and death, it was all just sad to me.” It might sound like an odd sentiment, but the way Porter skillfully frames the life of his character enables us to understand it. The narrator, like others in The Disappeared, is drifting through life. He has two young children and, late in the story, he will have his own moment of fear — strange sounds outside that compel him to check windows and locks.

Before getting to that tension, Porter follows the narrator home from the party, to a room where he often sits with a book and a drink at night:

These were the simple pleasures of my life these days — the way I spent those two or three hours in the evenings after work, just after the kids had fallen asleep. Did I want more? I sometimes believed I did, but at that moment, I was content to simply sit there and listen to this music, to the strange poetry of it, to hold a drink in my hand, and to know that I was in my own house and that I was safe here.

The Disappeared is a book about those ripe moments when we are “feeling at peace but also somehow adrift, somehow disconnected from things,” as if “untethered from some larger purpose.”