Complex family saga a stunning, surprising debut

Regina Porter’s first novel, “The Travelers,” starts in 1946 with 4-year-old James asking his father why people need sleep. Within seven pages, James has gone to law school, married, divorced, started and ended an affair, married again, and told his grown son Rufus that the way to keep a marriage together is “by not getting a divorce.” Soon it is 2009 and “the man James” is lounging in a pool with his mixedrace grandchildren, in whose faces he finally starts to see hints of himself — though he still doesn’t fully understand why he can’t call them mulatto.

What kind of novel opens intimately on a character just to rip through six decades in less than a snap?

What kind of novel, indeed. “The Travelers” is one of the most formally surprising — and successfully so — debuts I’ve read in years. The man James, it turns out, is an entry into whole clans of characters: the Christies, a black family with roots in Buckner County, Ga., and the Bronx; the Camphors, a white family in a Buckner County gated community whose son, Hank, is actually the illegitimate child of our man James; and the Applewoods, the black family

The Travelers

who move in next door, who are also related to the Christies. Then there is Eloise Delaney, daughter of cannery workers and a future Women in the Air Force pilot, whose teenage love affair with Agnes Christie turns into one of the most tender, emotional arcs in the book.

In chronicling these journeys, Porter moves back and forth through characters and time at an impressive clip, writing with authority, insight and humor. A captivating storyteller, Porter proves as intelligent an observer of the startling shapes a lifetime can take as its most intimate and unforgettable moments.

Porter’s formal inventiveness stretches beyond narrative. Carefully chosen photographs are placed throughout the novel to enhance mood, time and place. The narration shifts into various modes of storytelling with delightful facility: oral tradition, epistolary, playwriting and Joycean stream of consciousness (Rufus is a Joyce scholar). It is no small delight, either, to read Porter’s consistently excellent and energetic dialogue: When a married character makes a drunken advance on another married character, justifying, “You remind me of someone I know. Knew.” the woman replies, “Dear man, don’t we all?”

Porter’s robust background as a playwright shows. In place of an epigraph we are given a cast of characters, time, setting and background — pages that retrospectively read not just as a guide for groggy readers but rather as a narrative move in itself. Her characters include a Shakespeare scholar and a man obsessed with Tom Stoppard’s absurd existential comedy “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

That man is Eddie Christie, who, trapped on a ship while serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War, turns to Stoppard’s play for emotional and mental solace. In the play, two minor characters from “Hamlet” find themselves unwittingly doomed to death in some more important person’s tragedy (Hamlet’s) — they are also trapped on a ship. And so every character in “The Travelers” is a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ordinary people caught in the sweep of history, making the best of those moments in which the grand story barges into their small private lives. Yet Porter also seems determined not to afflict anyone in her novel with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s plight in “Hamlet”; none of her 30-plus characters is reduced to an extra in someone else’s story.

What happens when a novel takes an ethical stance against sidelining a character? When it attempts to give each glancing soul a glimmer of full humanity? The answer is something that looks very much like life itself, especially in these messy and overwhelmingly interconnected times — if not like very many novels in the Western tradition. Sometimes, the result can feel too much like a jigsaw puzzle, drawing the reader’s attention away from the emotional heart to piecing together how this person is related to that. The structure can also resemble a trend in recent publishing of slapping the words “a novel” on a collection of loosely linked short stories in order to make it marketable. But most of the time, the complexity and richness of “The Travelers” is simply stunning, not a ruse but the singular product of a capacious intellect and generous curiosity.

“Come now,” Claudia, Porter’s Shakespeare scholar, writes. “Entertain us. We’ve been standing on our feet all day. We’ll stand some more. Bring out the fool. The murderous king. The wretched prince. The coldhearted queen. God help you, if we are bored. An agreement has been made between Shakespeare and his audience. … He will take anyone with him who is willing to travel.” The same could be said of Regina Porter and “The Travelers.”

Meng Jin is a San Francisco fiction writer. Her first novel, “Little Gods,” will be published by Custom House in January 2020. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com