The Near Future

by Joe Ashby Porter

" The Near Future is a little jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting—among other things—old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination is of the truly droll sort, and with it he homes very closely in upon the truth—alas."—Richard Ford Winner of the Academy Award (2004) from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Joe Ashby Porter , a Shakespeare scholar at Duke University, is the author of three short story collections and two novels.

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Joseph Ashby Porter (1942-2019) was an American short story writer, novelist, and Shakespeare scholar who taught at Duke University.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The quirky characters are shallow. The plot is too palpable for the book to be artistically plotless and too boring and silly for the book to be popular fiction. The prose itself is straightforward. Porter’s fondness for unusual words is still present, but his writing is far from poetic. The slightly futuristic reality is conveyed in an exceedingly conventional manner. The dialogue, as in Touch Wood, is a stilted mixture of formal sentence construction and slang. One gets the sense from this and from his use of obscure vocabulary that Porter is trying to convey an inability for people to truly communicate, but he fails to do anything with this. I suspect that he set out to create a hilarious novel with an undercurrent of uneasiness and satire. Unfortunately, he lacked the wit to pull it off. Ultimately, over the course of 240 pages, one is forced to recognize that Porter’s tricks are merely tricks.