A study of an American family in painfully difficult circumstances. Cadence and Elson have recently divorced, and what is painful and unresolved between them is magnified and destructive to their children. Chloe has left Houston for college on the East Coast, where she has finally overcome her problems with acceptance and is in love with Raja. Her devastation at the news of the divorce sets of a chain of events that have found her suspended for the rest of the school term and Raja in legal trouble. Her brother Richard remains in Houston, but is floating in a miasma of purposeless drinking, drugs and relationships while he tries to find his way. The story gives perspectives of each family member as it covers their lives from Chloe's return from school. The angst and confusion were achingly real, the pain palpable, the results not completely expected. Worthwhile read, recommended. ( )

In Between Days by Andrew Porter is a suspenseful family drama. An accurate, if labored, portrayal of the modern American family, In Between Days is not for those readers looking for a feel-good story. It is the kind of family drama that is dipped in a thick coating of dread. You know from the earliest chapters that one event will lead to another, and little, if anything, good can come of this tale. Porter certainly walks the plausibility line in regards to “how much bad can descend on one family,” but he sprinkles in hope when it is most needed and keeps things from become overly bleak.

The characters weren't necessarily likable or extremely memorable, but they were worth my attention. They were interesting and I wanted to grow with them. Unfortunately, the characters didn't grow or change much during the coarse of the novel. Plot is the central focus here and—having had such great characters to start with, in addition to my bias toward character-driven novels—this left me disappointed. Readers who enjoy plot-centric stories and don't mind heavy drama will love this book and the places it takes them. There are enough thrills and twists to sustain most fiction readers. Despite wishing it had gone in a different direction, I concur that In Between Days showed off Porter's talents. Although it doesn't sound like a hearty endorsement, this novel stands above the average and may point to an exciting future for its author. ( )

Told in alternating perspectives, this is a beautifully written novel about a family going through a difficult transition. I found a lot to relate to in this book and the characters were so familiar I could imagine them living in my neighborhood. Interesting and moving, a good read for a trip. ( )

The last review give a good resume of the plot. I can reject a book unread by "judging it by it's cover." I'm a little surprised I read "In Between Days" with the valley girl cover. Anyway, I liked this book. The switch between viewpoints was handled deftly without getting overinvolved with one character. No one in the family is very sympathetic. They are victims of their own mistakes. Oddly enough Lorna, Elson's (the father's girlfriend) is the most emotionally stable and ends up doing all the right things. The writing is pretty good -probably better written than this haha. The ending satisfying but not storybook and without resorting to phony heroics.

Andrew Porter has written an interesting look at a family falling apart, told from the alternating perspectives of the husband, Elson, and the wife, Cadence, and their grown children - Richard and Chloe. Elson and Cadence's once happy marriage turned bitter enough to end in divorce and Elson has taken up with a much younger woman, and Cadence has started an affair with one of her night school teachers. Both their children are adrift. Richard is working odd jobs and participating in a poetry workshop with a retired professor at Rice. The professor lauds Richard's poems, but Richard isn't sure if the praise is valid or simply the result of the closeted gay professor's attraction to him. Richard isn't doing much else with his life, other than hanging out at wild parties with a friend who's earning extra money as a gay prostitute. But he's the one character in the novel with the hope of a promising future as the retired professor keeps urging him to apply to an MFA program.

This complex stew of family conflict is exacerbated when the daughter is suspended from her East Coast college because her boyfriend beat up a fellow student - an act of violence she may have had a tangential part in.

I really admired the complexity of the characters here and the intriguing premise of the book, which gives plenty of opportunities to see how each of these characters performs under extreme pressure.

What surprised me most about the novel, though, is the author's clunky and often inelegant writing style. I know he attended the best MFA program in the country, won the Flannery O'Connor award, and has earned heaps of critical praise, but his prose is full of the kind of basic "mistakes" most writing guidebooks advise against.

First, he constantly "filters" every character's experience with "he thought" or "she wondered" or the even the more wordy alternative, which seems to be a personal favorite, "she found herself" wondering or thinking something. This filtering of a consciousness may have been common in 19th century novels, but most contemporary novelists don't bother with thought attributions. The book is told in alternating points of view, and in each chapter it's perfectly clear whose head we're inside of, so the attributions are never necessary.

He's also in love with what's often called "weaselly" words like "just," "somewhat," "a kind of," "actually" and "almost" that can usually be edited out of sentences without losing any of their meaning and more often than not, strengthening them. He weakens his already weak verbs, which are almost always "to be" constructions, by adding in a "began to" "started" "tried to" and the author's personal favorite "seemed to," which weakens every sentence it's in.

Just think of how much stronger the following 2 sentences could have been:

"Sometimes she found herself craving male attention in the same way that Fatima and her friends craved revolution. Sometimes she found herself resenting the lesbian force field that seemed to surround her."

Wouldn't that read a lot cleaner, and more powerfully, if it were simply:

Sometimes she craved male attention in the same way that Fatima and her friends craved revolution. Sometimes she resented the lesbian force field that surrounded her.

Some of the phrases he tacks on, like "some kind of" or "something like," reduce the sentences to absurdity. In the middle of a session in which the police are interrogating the father about his daughter's whereabouts, Elson gets up and runs several blocks away from the bar where he'd agreed to meet them and then realizes with "something like shame, something like embarrassment" that he's forgotten he had had driven his car to the bar.

Now I would argue that shame and embarrassment are such similar emotions there's no need to distinguish between them, but the "something like" renders the whole description silly - if the father weren't experiencing shame and embarrassment, but something like them, what exactly would those other emotions be? Similarly, when Chloe's boyfriend, Raja, gets very bad news about the boy he beat up, Chloe sees "something like fear" in his face. Wouldn't it exactly be fear?

Perhaps the most annoying writerly trick is the habit of emphasizing a point by having several sentences begin with the same phrase. It's a particular quirk of Porter's style that he relies on far too frequently, as in the following passage, which is a moment of the mother's reflection on how she wasn't that different from her rebellious daughter.

"Had she not done the exact same thing at Chloe's age, had she not abandoned her own parents, had she not dropped out of school to marry Elson, had she not given up her college studies for the sake of a boy..."

I get that the repetition creates its own poetic rhythm, but the device loses its effectiveness because the author does it so many times, sometimes switching out of one to start another one right after it. And it's done in every character's chapter, so the device doesn't show any one character's particular pattern of thought, and instead, like the filtering, becomes another writerly trick of constantly making the reader aware of the author at work and therefore unable to get fully immersed in the character's world.

He even uses it in dialogue where a police investigator questioning the daughter keeps repeating the phrase "why don't we start with" while overusing another one of Porter's favorite "weasel" words -- actually.

The passage above inside the mother's head, seems the most egregious because of the formality of "had she not" instead of the way a character would more likely think ("hadn't she") just adds further distancing from the character.

This device of repetition for emphasis he relies on at the word level too, by throwing synonyms together, but again if often reaches the points of silliness when someone "answers obliquely, evasively." The words convey so much the same meaning, there's really no need for the second one.

At some points, the extra emphasis through repetition looks ridiculous because it's immediately undermined. When Chloe learns that her college boyfriend would really rather be an art major than study chemical engineering, but his family won't allow it, we're told it's a such sensitive subject so she "never mentioned this, never even brought it up." But in the very next sentence, we're told the one time "she alluded to it," they had a very explicit conversation about him changing his major.

There is something schizophrenic about the need to use repetition to hammer points home, while so many strong verbs and other adjectives are constantly undermined with the overuse of "seemed to" and "almost" as in, "He almost never had enough money for anything." Lose the almost and isn't the point stronger?

It would have been so easy to reduce some of the verbosity. A character has a "goatee-style beard" instead of just a goatee. Too often "own" is thrown in after a possessive pronoun so we get the needlessly wordy "his own son." Reflexive pronouns are added to pronouns in phrases like "she herself had found" when there was never any doubt who the she was.

In flashbacks, Porter often uses "and then" when a simple "and" would have been enough and eliminated a phrase used by boring storytellers who don't know when to stop. He often throws "at one point," in when's it not needed, and when he's referring to an even earlier episode in a flashback, every verb has a "had" when one "had" going into the earlier flashback and one final one coming out of it would have been enough to ground the reader in the sequence of events. And he weakens too many verbs in the "would" construction when it's not needed.

The writing was so overwrought that at times I almost gave up on the novel - but the characters and the premise kept me going. And ultimately I was glad I did. When Chloe goes on the run, trying to escape to Mexico with her boyfriend, the storyline becomes quite powerful and the tension builds to a crescendo between the parents and their son. The ending and the final choice Chloe in particular makes I found to be fascinating and beautifully conveyed.

I may have belabored the style critiques and any of Porter's diehard fans can reject them as the jealousy of a wannabe writer who's been rejected by many of the literary magazines who've published his work, but I was still surprised that a writer of his talent - and the storyline and character portraits here show plenty of it - would not have had editors along the way who could have cleaned up his prose a bit.

As I was reading it, the novel's storyline reminded me of two other recent books. First, Michael Kardos' The Three Day Affair, which packs a powerful punch as characters make an initial bad choice and then keep compounding the original mistake when there were so many chances for them to escape their predicament. But as with Porter's novel, each step along the way you fully understand why the characters make the mistakes they do. John Burnham Schwartz's sequel to Reservation Road, Northwest Corner, is also a terrific novel about a college student on the lam after a fight that left a fellow student in the hospital, teetering on death. And I don't have any critiques of these two novels' styles. They're both masterfully written. ( )