Introducing The Rich People Have Gone Away

Our September selection

Regina Porter’s debut novel The Travelers begins with a rapid chronicling of the life of James “Jimmy” Vincent, an Irish attorney whose life is bookmarked by varied iterations of the word “fuck.” Early on, his dad suggests it as an explanation for people’s mistakes and messes; in teenhood and early adulthood, it aligns with sex; by the time he makes partner, it’s an expletive hurled at him by the woman he will eventually marry. By the time he’s in his 50s, James returns to his father’s words, and they have renewed resonance when his son, Rufus, asks him how to save his own marriage to a Black woman named Claudia Christie. James is conflicted, not over the question, which he tells his son is as simple as not getting a divorce, but because the circumstances makes him think of his biracial twin grandchildren and what he sees as their discordant halves. The seaming together of white and black is both familial and structural; the novel brings together the Vincent family and the Christie family, their histories, joys, and challenges, in vignettes that abandon chronology and spin out their kaleidoscopic narrative across six decades, from Georgia to New York. 

Porter’s new novel The Rich People Have Gone Away borrows the sprawling, kaleidoscopic lens of The Travelers and focuses primarily on the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York. Although the novel affords insight into the minutiae of living through a century-defining public health disaster, it is also much more than that—part mystery that peeks into the dissolving marriage of Theo Harper and his pregnant wife Darla, who goes missing when the couple retreats to upstate New York for a reprieve from a New York in lockdown. The novel is also part coming-of-age story, chronicling the backstory of Ruby, Darla’s best friend, and how she and her Japanese chef husband became owners of a Michelin-star restaurant as well as the daily struggles of Xavier, a teen who is house sitting for a cousin who lives in the Harpers’ building and whose mother is on a ventilator, fighting for her life. There are a number of lenses in The Rich People Have Gone Away that represent another tumbler, another moving part, another character who intersects with one of these three in moving, troubling, unexpected ways.  

What makes Porter’s novel so memorable is not her attempt to sell us one neat, convincing genre but her elegant interweaving of so many. This is undoubtedly a pandemic novel, but is also a novel carrying the legacy of 9-11, of Hiroshima, of addiction, of Savannah, of the Dance Theater of Harlem, of the 2020 protests. The narrative surprises—and there are many—are not the surprises often delivered by generic arcs but instead the surprises only gifted to us by intimacy: we are only allowed the knowledge that comes with how well we get to know Porter’s characters.

The Rich People Have Gone Away is a beautiful, startling book, one that insists on defying categorization in favor of an uncomfortable closeness to people living through some of the most harrowing circumstances of their lives. We can’t wait to discuss this book with you throughout the month of September. We will be in conversation with Regina on September 25th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST.

Have you started the novel yet? What are your early impressions?