The Porthole

9781963270280

Mcsweeney's Literary Arts Fund

Hardback $28.00

Overview

Helena Desir, a filmmaker of some reputation, arrives at a country asylum for sufferers of psychic exhaustion after a tragic accident on the location of one of her films. Afflicted by insomnia and disorientation, the elusive and volatile Helena seems bullheaded in a determination to end her career in film, despite her studio’s insistence that she could and should return.

She begins her rest cure at Jaquith House with the eccentric Dr. Duvaux and the community of his asylum—including an agéd sound artist and spiritualist, an international entrepreneur, a tennis pro, a woodsman, a petulant aspiring actress, twin Finnish massage therapists, and a sex-addicted chef. But having lived a very carefully constructed reality for some time, the rupture after the accident, the intrusions of her fellow sufferers, and an inescapable reckoning with her tyrannical directorial methods threaten to shatter her sense of self.

As the story of her turbulent relationships with her lead actors comes out in pieces, along with the memories of each of her films, the ghosts of her past begin to haunt her—as does her culpability in the accident on set. When, in an elaborate séance, one of these ghosts from her past is conjured at Jaquith House, a shattering confrontation takes place. Helena must either choose a path forward or remain among the walking dead.

In Porthole, Joanna Howard takes on film as a form for interrogation. Hallucinatory and imagistic, it attempts to capture the cinematic in language. Its characters dwell as much in their film memory as in their real lives, and the narrator sees the world through the camera lens, as if through a sea of glass. Putting a new twist on the notion of the “casting couch,” Porthole explores a woman’s culpability in maintaining systems of exploitation, as well as her relationship to the insidious, corrosive nature of power. In doing so, it holds up a warped mirror to our collective fixation with artistic genius, asking what lines we are willing to cross to for our art, and whether art can absolve our sins.

Author Bio

Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Verse, McSweeney’s, BOMB, Chicago Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir Rerun Era; the novel Foreign Correspondent; the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round; and Field Glass, a collaborative novel written with Joanna Ruocco. She also co-translated Walls by Marcel Cohen and Cows by Frederic Boyer. She taught in the Literary Arts program at Brown University for 15 years before moving to University of Denver’s PhD program in Literary Arts, where she teaches prose writing and prose and poetry hybrids, narrative theory, and contemporary literature.