Présentation de l'éditeur
“Andrew Porter is a born storyteller . . . He makes his own space instantly and invites you in. Hats off!” —Barry Hannah
From a commanding new voice in fiction comes a novel as perceptive as it is generous: a portrait of an American family trying to cope in our world today, a story of choices and doubts and transgressions.
The Hardings are teetering on the brink. Elson—once one of Houston’s most promising architects, who never quite lived up to expectations—is recently divorced from his wife of thirty years, Cadence. Their grown son, Richard, is still living at home: driving his mother’s minivan, working at a local coffee shop, resisting the career as a writer that beckons him. But when Chloe Harding gets kicked out of her East Coast college, for reasons she can’t explain to either her parents or her older brother, the Hardings’ lives start to unravel. Chloe returns to Houston, but the dangers set in motion back at school prove inescapable. Told with piercing insight, taut psychological suspense, and the wisdom of a true master of character, this is a novel about the vagaries of love and family, about betrayal and forgiveness, about the possibility and impossibility of coming home.
Extrait
I.
SINCE HIS DIVORCE, Elson has fallen into the habit of stopping by the Brunswick Hotel for a quick drink after work. He likes the Brunswick Hotel because it’s one of the newest hotels in the city and because he knows that no one he knows will ever find him here. He likes the anonymity of it, of drinking here alone in the third-floor bar area, of sitting here at the window, staring out across the street at the futuristic office buildings, at their slick glass surfaces, knowing that behind these glass surfaces men and women in finely pressed suits are probably packing up their bags and briefcases, making plans for dinner or drinks. He likes to imagine these people leaving, likes to watch them as they walk out the door and get in their cars. There’s something strangely soothing about it all, about this daily routine of watching the city empty out, of watching it grow quiet and dark.
Tonight, the barroom is empty, save for a few out-of-town businessmen, drinking alone, and outside the window, the city is quiet, a light rain coming down now, a cold winter rain, which is somewhat atypical for Houston this time of year. In an hour from now, he will be meeting Lorna Estrada, the woman he has been sleeping with for the past six months, the woman he met just after his wife left him, at a barbecue at his friend Dave Millhauser’s house. Lorna is twenty-seven years old, and many years his junior, and yet surprisingly mature for her age. He sometimes speculates that this is because of her Filipino upbringing, because of the strictness of her parents, or other times because of the fact that she came to the States so young, that she got a firsthand glimpse of how cruel the world could be to a non-English-speaking adult, especially in a city like Houston. The first and only child in her family to ever receive a degree in anything, Lorna works as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts and shares with Elson a strange and fervent interest in minimalist architecture. That Elson is himself an architect was perhaps part of the initial allure, the fact that they could talk with ease about the work of Claudio Silvestrin or Vincent Van Duysen or Souto de Moura, but now, Elson wonders, what has that allure become? A few empty hours at the end of the day. A couple of drinks, maybe a movie. Mostly sex. And even that has become routine. In the early days of their relationship—if that is in fact what this is—they would go to the houses of Lorna’s friends. They would sit around drunkenly discussing the state of the world, or art, just as he’d done back in college, and though most of these people were younger than him, some of them young enough to be his own children, he still enjoyed it. He liked to watch the flicker of the can
