New York City, 2020. Darla Jacobson and her husband Theo Harper are about to leave their Brooklyn apartment building to spend the summer in the Jacobson family’s cottage in the Catskills. Leaving the city feels safer with Darla being in her first trimester of pregnancy and also, life in the big apple has gotten quite uncomfortable and much less fun with all the restrictions. As is their routine, they stop in the woods on their drive to the cottage to go for a hike. But it ends abruptly as Theo’s strange confession about his ancestry leads to an argument and Darla storms off. Two people enter the woods, only one comes out.
In the ensuring search for Darla, their open marriage and Theo’s questionable character are thrust into the spotlight. Soon he becomes the prime suspect in the case of her disappearance. As the perfect victim, the search for her moves many – and enrages others.
But not everyone has the opportunity to escape their city dwelling and the chance to get lost in the woods this summer. We meet Xavier, a teenager in a Cardi-B shirt who housesits his cousins apartment in Darla and Theo’s building, struggling to focus on his online-schooling while his mum is on a ventilator. And there is Ruby, Darla’s oldest friend. The two forever bonded by the fact they both had a parent working in the World Trade Center in 2001 – only one of who returned home to their family. Ruby is now stuck in the city with her partner Katsumi, navigating the meagre government support in a tough battle to keep their restaurant open and their staff paid.
There is Darla’s mother, and Theo’s affair’s husband who also happens to be the cop on his case; a disturbed neighbour in the Catskills who only has his family’s ghosts and a scared service dog for company, and a private investigator who might want to consider a career in PR. In other words, there are a lot of characters here, no darling has been killed in the making of this book. All of these characters are interesting in their own right, though there is none we really get to build a relationship with. They are sharply drawn and flawed, but often seem to be caricatures rather than humans, symbol for many of the things that are amiss in society. And Porter’s analysis of that is smart and witty, sometimes funny and often searing, but even – or especially – once I got into the main plot, I wondered why it was necessary to squeeze so many themes and storylines in here.
There is an excellent contemporary novel at the heart of this and Regina Porter is a young writer to keep an eye on, but there was too much excess that could have done with some serious editing down. And it’s a pity because it not only diluted my enjoyment of this novel, but I feel like she wasted the plot and characters for at least one other book, one that would have made for a great, and perhaps more vulnerable novel: Xavier’s story. To me, the more interesting Covid-tale is what happens at the apartment building where The Rich People Have Gone Away opens.
In fact, while the pandemic could not be ignored in this novel and the observation from the title provides the starting point for the main plot, like many of the themes addressed here, it was addressed but never fully explored and dissected. Some interesting observations were made, but in general the social criticisms Porter makes were left incomplete. Next to Covid and racism, we also race past 9/11, polyamorymory, social mobility and a whole range of other themes.
All this marks Porter as an interesting mind to watch, though she might need some more time to find a way to tell equally interesting and compelling stories. The necessary ingredients are definitely there, it is the methods that might need some work.
Published by Hogarth, 2024
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