GoldenHandcuffsReview.com

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.

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