Porter, Joe
Description
Product Description
In the mid-seventies four adults from beyond their national borders find themselves marooned in Jeffersonian academic Charlottesv
...
ille, 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.
From Booklist
A strange and sometimes charming study in intimacy, Porter's novel focuses on four people who are living together in a rented house in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jean-Luc is a French citizen who has settled there to teach French literature at the local university. Jean-Luc's wife, Irene, is also a French citizen, and works as a reporter for a French newspaper. Mouse, Irene's girlfriend, is a Native American woman from Canada, who works as a waitress in Washington, D.C. And Chantal, also from Canada, is a graduate student at the university, where she fell in love with Jean-Luc. Porter chronicles these four lives in close detail, beginning in 1974, and articulates each person's perspective on the nuances of their overlapping romances. Surprisingly, the conflicts that arise within this quartet of lovers bring them closer together, and these four foreigners manage to achieve relatively stable relationships. While none of Porter's characters are particularly likable, they are vivid and believable, and their personal stories give us a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the human heart. Bonnie Johnston
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Review
Porter is a literally first-class writer...He's earned that eminence by a number of qualities-a prose of elegant and deceptive simplicity and a sly but unsleeping comic vision. (Reynolds Price )
Everything except the language is French about this delightful novel of the American seventies: the characters (in varying degrees), the sexual sophistication, the imperturbable wit hovering above the agitated mÈnage · quatre, the civilized, crystalline prose with which Joe Ashby Porter draws his point that love-when we are lucky-drives us. (Jaimy Gordon, author of Bogeywoman and She Drove Without Stopping )
Reading it is like watching a kite rise into sunlight on a new summer morning. (Harry Mathews, author of Tlooth and Cigarettes )
Joe Ashby Porter has written a Vietnam-era La Ronde, but with no villainy–it is as much a prayer for grace as a story about it-that is consistently lyrical, intelligent, and driven by hope. (Frederick Busch, author of The Night Inspector and A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life )
Mr. Porter's insight is quite acute and explanatory of the world...if Kundera suddenly discovered he had a sweet, tolerant streak, this might be what he'd write. (Richard Ford )
From the Inside Flap
In the mid-seventies four adults from beyond their national borders find themselves marooned in Jeffersonian academic Charlottesville, Virginia. The journalistic Irène and her professor husband Jean-Luc are both French. Chantal, a graduate student, is from Montreal. Mouse is 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.
With his new novel Joe Ashby Porter continues his series of cultural core samples from the path that led here, now advancing past the sixties ebullience of his Eelgrass into the truer and more concentrated edginess of the seventies.
About the Author
Joe Ashby Porter is professor of English at Duke University. His other fiction includes the short story collections The Kentucky Stories and Lithuania and the novel Eelgrass. He has also writte
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