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The Rich People Have Gone Away: A Novel Kindle Edition
“Cinematic, preternaturally humane, and absolutely unputdownable—I just loved it.”—Claire Lombardo, People “What Your Favorite Authors are Reading This Summer”
“Riveting.”—Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake
Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their upscale Park Slope building has this privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B T-shirt, nor Darla’s best friend, Ruby, and her partner, Katsumi, who stay behind to save their Michelin-starred restaurant.
During an upstate hike on the aptly named Devil’s Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret—and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he finds himself the prime suspect. As Darla’s and Theo’s families and friends come together to search for her, with Ruby and Katsumi stepping in to broker peace, past and present collide with startling consequences.
Set against the pulse of an ever-changing city, The Rich People Have Gone Away connects the lives of ordinary New Yorkers to tell a powerful story of hope, love, and inequity in our times—while reminding us that no one leaves the past behind completely.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHogarth
- Publication dateAugust 6, 2024
- File size14555 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“An astonishing accomplishment . . . I would greedily follow this writer anywhere. . . . This is the Covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch.”—The Washington Post
“Terrific . . . Inherent in any discussion of privilege must also be a discussion of race, and Porter examines these inseparable ideas with expert nuance in this novel.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Porter’s story casts clear, vivid light on community, privilege, love, loss and the human dilemma—don’t expect to put this one down ’til you’re done.”—Chronogram
“A work of great ambition and elan.”—The Guardian
“Settles its gaze on matters of race and class, underlined by its breathtaking ending . . . This restless, intentionally unsettling novel establishes Porter as a distinctive, confident literary voice.”—Kirkus Review, starred review
“Striking . . . Porter keenly explores themes of generational and racial privilege and a community’s fragile bonds. This one makes the lockdown worth revisiting.”—Publishers Weekly
“Deft and recommended.”—Library Journal
“Regina Porter weaves beauty and humor with pathos, in prose that is winding, prescient, and profound.”—Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal
“A masterpiece of human portraiture . . .”—Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden
“Riveting . . . The Rich People Have Gone Away mines the delicate and treacherous terrain in which human relationships and social divisions are rooted.”—Charmaine Wilkerson, author of Black Cake
“Regina Porter has crafted an inventive, hilarious, and wholly unpredictable work full of vibrant prose and genuine tenderness.”—Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck
“An immersive examination of the human condition in the face of tragedy and triumph.”—Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl
“A layer cake of suspense and a vibrantly alive portrait of several generations of New Yorkers as they fearlessly stake their anchors in the rippling sea of our era.”—Kashana Cauley, author of The Survivalists
“[The Rich People Have Gone Away] is cinematic, preternaturally humane, and absolutely unputdownable—I just loved it.”—Claire Lombardo, People, “What Your Favorite Authors Are Reading This Summer”
“A glorious jambalaya of word, thought, and feeling . . .”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
“An arresting novel of race, class, food, music, and family as thrilling and dynamic as the city itself.”—Andrew Ridker, author of Hope
“A delight.”—Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
mr. harper takes sex in doorways. Halts new lovers at the threshold of his front door. Left hand on shoulder. Right hand on hip. He searches the ninth-floor hallway for furtive eyes before pressing the whole of himself in the tender nook of his lover’s ass.
“Here,” he says. There is gravel in Mr. Harper’s voice. He understands the implications of force. Social distancing was in place before the March lockdown, gloves and masks. He waits for a greeting, a slight rearing back, a double-cheeked sway, the perfect balance of ass to cock and cock to ass. He will undo his pants in a matter of seconds and let left hand descend, down, down, down the slender side of his lover’s body, bringing disorder and chaos. He has done this deed a thousand times where he now stands: gripping the doorknob to his front door. If you asked him, he would tell you with gravelly certainty that his profession as an aesthetic advisor helps. Geometric shapes on beveled glass door, volute, chrome handles, ornate gold bell. Fixtures that have stood the test of time. Inanimate objects are immune to pandemics and viruses, though the wrong touch, in this environment, could make a well man sick. He knows the right cleansing agents to refinish, to buff, and to restore. Tournez à gauche—left is for opening doors. Tournez à droite—right is for closing them.
If a woman is wearing pants, he waits for her to unzip while he unbuckles. “Pants are so damn cumbersome,” he says, mouth working the curving nape of her neck or the armpit of a shirt he’s just pulled off. And if she wears a skirt or a dress—God’s gifts, he thinks, for the ease with which they allow him to peel away underwear, cotton, spandex, polyester, or silk. Perhaps it’s his midwestern upbringing, but Mr. Harper is always a little disappointed when he finds women riding bare beneath their clothes. Exposed private parts make the public part of sex less private. To rip, to tear. He’s never worn nor does he sniff/collect underwear as souvenirs. But he has annihilated a fair share. Hers. His. And theirs. Why grapple with social constructs or the contradictions within himself? Everything is an opening onto something else.
But the stores are closed.
And the city’s shut, shut, shutting down.
Hard to believe—rock bottom, rock-bottom hard—that not even a month ago he helped a real estate agent sell three houses in one week. Walked into a 1900s Victorian in Ditmas Park where West Indian families, intent on suburbia and white picket fences, will never be able to return upon sale. May Florida and Long Island keep them, he thought, turning to Simon Pratt, the real estate broker, and the eager young buyers.
“Let me tell you a thing or two about doorways. The Egyptians built them as portals to the afterlife, a means of transcendence, their version of somewhere over the rainbow via waterways . . .”
What he wanted to say was, The trick to sex in doorways is to see if you can begin and complete the act—slam bodies together tight as clams. The sex is for you, never for intruder, voyeur, happenstance, other, her, him, them, though the anticipation comes with its own frills, thrills, and expletives. When the sex plays right, your throat convulses, oh, yes it does, and the air threatens to leave your body. When the sex plays right, you stare at the ones who beg for a change of scenery—wanting to finish fucking on the Persian carpet or the hardwood floor or the sofa, bed, desk. Whinny whoop. Whinny whoop whoop. “Next time, darling . . .” you tell them. But that honor is saved for women or men you want to see again. There is sex and there is meaning.
The hidden door you point out to the eager young couple—right behind the fireplace—lands the sale. As soon as they leave—calling their real estate attorney on the way home—you fuck Simon Pratt to celebrate. The outing is better than cognac or Veuve Clicquot. But Simon’s experience rates altogether different. He confesses later to his husband, Felix Ramirez, with whom he shares an open marriage and hides nothing, that fucking you made him grateful he isn’t straight.
“We have our anger,” Simon said. “But straight anger’s a human rake.”
Now, if you live in the wrong neighborhood or the right neighborhood—Mr. Harper lives in Park Slope—toilet tissue is in short supply. He goes to Glory Groceries on Seventh Avenue on the way home from work and you would think a colony of ants had usurped humanity. The shelves are depleted and the manager—what is he? Maybe he’s Hispanic? Latino?—the manager has worked in Glory Groceries over a decade and Mr. Harper, who has shopped in the store for just as long, has never thought to ask his name. The manager is frazzled and lugs two twenty-pound bags of Canilla rice on his back. Every aisle in the store—one through eight—is jam-packed with customers. The rice, like the beans and the cooking oil, jars of tomato sauce, pasta, all things canned, are going, going, gone.
The manager assaults Mr. Harper with unexpected civility. “How’s your wife?”
Mr. Harper smiles and says, “She’s coming along. We’re pregnant.”
“Congratulations,” the manager says. He waves his ungloved hand. “Never thought I’d see this.”
This is the early days, the eve of the lockdown. Mr. Harper doesn’t know how to respond or what to say. “Welcome to the zombie apocalypse.” Is it his imagination or when he blurts out “zombie apocalypse,” does the manager step away from him? Do the anxiety-ridden shoppers quicken their pace?
The manager says, “My wife thinks the world is ending. I don’t know. Maybe the world is ending.”
There are too many people in the store. There are too many people on the planet. There are too many people invading his space and being frantic. Mr. Harper prefers his frantic coital, carnal, strings undone but not attached. Surrender. Hands up. It is Mr. Harper’s turn to back away. He’ll find a better day, another store. “Mother Nature’s acting out. Population overload.”
A senior citizen, wire glasses, gray beard, pushing a buggy piled sky-high with Gorton’s Fish Sticks, Stouffer’s family-sized lasagna, Amy’s Pizza, and Green Giant frozen vegetables, does a U-turn.
“You hush your mouth. People said that shit during the AIDS epidemic. Hotspot. New York City. Hotspot. Pandemic, fucking politicians. Where’s the lard? So stupid.”
He walks away, leaning on his buggy like it’s a walking cane, black-and-white shirt a moving chessboard.
Mr. Harper retreats through the store’s double glass doors.
Theodore Harper brought the art deco door with him when he closed on his Park Slope apartment. He had scoured antique stores around the city in search of the perfect door. The one that would set the entrance to his home above the rest. That was over twelve years ago. And that shopping spree, that splurge, marked a shift to a successful career as an aesthetic advisor after selling furniture to rich people at ABC Carpet & Home for close to a decade. He never shares with lovers that his co-op was once rent stabilized—a third of the renters second- and third-generation African American and Puerto Rican families. Or that his neighborhood was considered part of Prospect Heights before the real estate agents rechristened it the North Slope, creating an imaginary zoning line that synced with his new career. From the South Slope to Fort Greene to Bedford-Stuyvesant to Manhattan and Williamsburg, real estate agents now came equipped with aesthetic experts like himself. Most of them, in his opinion, shams. Mr. Harper made peace years ago with his midwestern architecture degree and background. Frank Lloyd Wright country, he barks/smiles whenever there’s the need to put down East Coast comeuppance.
Possibility.
Probability.
Personality.
He wears a mask and plastic gloves when he leaves the apartment now or ventures down to the lobby to retrieve his mail or pick up takeout. Only residents are permitted to enter their co-op building. The board’s decision—Mr. Harper is on the board—resulted in half the residents’ fleeing Park Slope for country homes. Other residents have hunkered down—he and Darla among them—in their apartments. A handful of fledgling couples consisting of girlfriends, boyfriends, and others are betting that love will endure the quarantine.
In the lobby, a subletter—must be a subletter—holds the elevator, waiting for Mr. Harper to join him. Mr. Harper does not recognize the young man. Only three families of color reside in his building. The skinny African American teenager seems dwarfed by an oversized Cardi B T-shirt with “Diamond District in the Jag” splayed across Cardi B’s authentically fake breasts. The teenager wears a red bandanna over a disposable mask. Mr. Harper is certain he is neither resident nor resident’s kid, but the teenager pushes the close button before Mr. Harper can confront him.
Product details
- ASIN : B0CLL22R4D
- Publisher : Hogarth (August 6, 2024)
- Publication date : August 6, 2024
- Language : English
- File size : 14555 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 340 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1787335283
- Best Sellers Rank: #45,557 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Regina Porter is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and recipient of a 2017-2018 Rae Armour West Postgraduate Scholarship. She is also a 2017 Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar. Her fiction has been published in The Harvard Review. An award-winning writer with a background in play-writing, Porter has worked with Playwrights Horizons, the Joseph Papp Theater, New York Stage and Film, the Women’s Project, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, and Horizon Theater Company.
She has been anthologized in Plays from Woolly Mammoth by Broadway Play Services and Heinemann’s Scenes for Women by Women. She has also been profiled in Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in History and Criticism from the University of Alabama Press.
Porter was born in Savannah, Georgia, and lives in Brooklyn.
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This is a COVID novel. It explores the lives of multiple interconnected families during the Spring and Summer of 2020 in New York City, and does not shy away from the class, racial, and political implications, as the title might suggest. Porter is a master of complex characters, and this book has made me want to pick up others she's written. I knew her writing would get along with my reading sensibilities when the first few pages made me say aloud, "Oh, I hate this man." I still did by the end, but I loved that the text never wrote him off — instead, it pushed the reader to see him as a human being without coddling or validating the many things he gets wrong.
I read a lot of ~sad girl litfic~, and if you're looking for the energy of complicated and often unlikable protagonists paired with the pace of a mystery and the commentary of a book that could only have been written from inside of and just after a global pandemic, this book is absolutely for you. Loved it, ripped through it in two days, would recommend.
This book tried to do a lot of things all at once. We had 9/11, racism, COVID, upward mobility, polyamory, and a whole lore more in one novel. While I felt like there was a lot happening that kept me in the book it felt disjointed and I found myself asking why all of these different moments were necessary to tell the story.
The beginning chapters felt too disjointed/unorganized and Theo, the first character introduced, was a completely unlikable character, and I almost gave up on this book.
But around 25%, the book started to come together, and where the story was leading, became clear.
Ultimately almost all of the characters introduced have some connection. They are living during COVID, and each couple/family is dealing with their issues, some issues are born out of COVID, and others dealing with life. The book became more organized when each chapter was devoted to a certain couple/family, and occasionally another character was also a subject in that chapter.
This is a look into the lives of these characters, the good, the bad and the ugly. Decisions that are made which affect their futures and others in the orbit. Interwoven in these stories are issues of race, privilege, wealth, classism, mental health, marriage, and friendship.
There are twists and turns that are interesting and keep the story moving along at a fevered pace.
Glad I finished the book, it was a satisfying read!
Turns out the first chapter was originally a standalone short story. It really sucked me in.
Porter’s use of wry humor makes the book delicious. Sometimes she writes in a type of “spoken word” and you have to catch the unique rhythm to traverse the text.
My favorite chapter was “Chat Room”. I liked “Chat Room” so much I think I need to go to a book festival to get a book signed by her.
The character Theo is intriguing in that he isn’t closeted in any way. He has many shades to his character (not just the 30% - pun intended). The only people still closeted in some fashion drive the storyline. I guess closeted could also reflect Covid quarantine; but self-imposed.
The author deftly describes Covid and all its societal impacts. Nothing felt cut and paste, it was mapped out perfectly in my opinion and mimicked my lived experience of that time. The ending was perfectly timeline-tailored for American history’s next gasp.
Finally, I like how she thanked all those that aided her in her research at the back of the book. I hope she had fun gathering the information.
Now I will go back and read her first book!
Ironically I read this while being sick with COVID-19 and quarantining in Iowa.
I was left with a lot of questions, but this was still a worthy read.