Porthole

by Joanna Howard, Rita Bullwinkel (editor)

World-renowned art-house film director Helena Désir may (or may not!) be responsible for the on-set death of Corey, her latest muse, leading man of the moment, and frequent bedmate. Haunted by the accident, a long trail of ex-lovers, and the corporate film studio who desperately wants to keep her, their cash cow, at work, Helena unravels and is swiftly delivered to a luxury retreat known as Jaquith House, where fellow sufferers of psychic exhaustion—an agèd sound artist, an international entrepreneur, a tennis pro, a woodsman, twin Finnish massage therapists, and a sex-addicted chef—ferry her from meal, to rest activity, to spa experience, to canoe ride, and back to dinner again, with unmatched hilarity and wit. Told with a captivating quick clip of a gait, Porthole is a portrait of an auteur at the peak of her powers and in the midst of an extravagant, albeit well-dressed, meltdown. Hallucinatory and imagistic, filled to the brim with champagne toasts, boathouse romps, brothels, yoga pants, Parisian hotels, dressing room hookups, and red carpet faux pas, Porthole gifts us the world through the eye of the camera lens, as if through a sea of glass, and If we’ve sinned in the service of art, can we be forgiven?

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

100 pages, Hardcover

Published June 17, 2025

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

PORTHOLE disintegrates boundaries between personhood and performance, auteur and addict, in a beguiling novel about the outer limits of artistic indiscretion. Fellini's 8 1/2 with a twist of Moshfeghian wickedness.

[Nathan Holic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not find this engaging or enjoyable.

We will chalk it up to “not my thing.” Maybe it’s yours.

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm afraid this was dreadfully boring.

[Cory]

2.5 rounded up - writing was nice but overall pretty blah.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Porthole' lives somewhere between the normally-plotted-American-literary tradition and the atmospheric-european-innovative tradition.

With a few changes, it might have become a pretty basic novel about a filmmaker reminiscing about her lovers/leading men while recovering from a traumatic event.

Or it could have gone the other way and become completely hazy, plotless (non-derogatory), philosophical work.

The fact that it lives in between, or meanders between one form and the other, is not only masterful, but fits the overall tone of the book perfectly.

There is an arc to the book, or various arcs that rise and fall, meet, intersect, pass and so on. As far as a central theme, it's hard to say what this is, though one can feel it, or them. Notions on the creation of art, of course, but also about the boundaries of identity in art and life: who is the creator? who is the director? who is the actor? who is the character? who is the audience? We expect the boundaries between these roles or identities to be firm and clear but, at least for Helena and her coterie, they tend to shift, dissolve and meld.

For those above reasons (and a few others) a lot of readers are probably going to find this an uncomfortable ride at first. You can't expect that every character that is introduced is going to have some neat purpose or resolution, at least as far as Helena is concerned. Some scenes exist (as far as I could tell) to explore an idea that is related to the rest of the book conceptually, but contributes little to nothing in terms of plot. (This is good. It's like a side quest in a video game, or tunnel in a maze that is filled with beautiful things, but which does not get you to the end.) You'll also have to accept that a gauzy, pensive scene may turn into a long conversation about a past relationship.

There is a single moment, about two-thirds of the way through, that struck my in a way that few moments do any more.:When Helena wakes in David's dressing room to find the medium from the play straddling her, and the medium is revealed to, in fact, be David. This is a beautiful illustration of retroactivity in fiction: we realize (or at least I realized, maybe other readers would understand this from the beginning) suddenly that David, and perhaps all of the other actors are masters of disguise, or at least skilled enough to fool Helena, and that any of 'characters' at Jaquith house could simply be a disguise.

Other notable points: playful Pynchonesque names like George Prawn, a perfume called Bave Cedre, a wine called Longee Duree. Many textual and cinematic references (one of which I caught was Prawn's allusion to 'The Prisoner').

I like that there is mention in the acknowledgments of the 'post-novel'. Surely this term has been around for a while, and it seems so simple as to be inevitable. It's the first time that I've come across it and describes this work perfectly.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joanna Howard's brilliant Porthole creates a believable and compelling oeuvre of an auteur's films. We are deep inside Helena's mind and senses, and Howard employs a narrative voice at variance from its telling, a narrator who can't distinguish her own thinking from her talking aloud to other fellow characters. Helena is a believably great filmmaker even though we can never see her films, and she is both a self-involved narcissist and a very likeable guide to her life and art. These are convincing movies and actors and locales, especially the Magic Mountain retreat she goes to in the hope of recovering her sanity. What impresses me is how tangible these movies are, how well Joanna Howard ensconces us in their stories, their making, and the dysfunctions that conduct artists irregularly toward great art. This is a rare feat, making us have faith in a parallel history of cinema. Joanna Howard speaks in other writing (than in this novel) of her childhood movie education provided by her mother, when she was a very young child (she watched Taxi Driver at age six), or pulled out of bed to watch Rex Harrison, Laraine Day, or Joel McCrea on the late show. The novel’s locations are also gorgeous, and they are real and constructed out of Howard’s elegant experience and understanding of place, like this:

"Ah, Grenoble! Perhaps the truest of river cities. Looking back on it now, I can blame even my love affair with a river on that fiasco war picture. Beautiful Grenoble, where the dark river Drac, catching the light of the Alps, snakes its way toward the river Isere like a procession of lanterns. The city itself is a city of remnants, of Roman walls, of leper hospitals, of the garrisons of religious wars. Remnants of baronetcies and comital land parcels, remnants of Huguenots and the pillaged tombs of the dauphins, remnants of a centuries' old glove industry. Great glove rivalries went on between Grenoble and Grasse through the late Middle Ages, through edicts and the revocation of edicts of the sixteenth century, until a Protestant purge finally gave Grenoble the monopoly on gloves, and the number of glovers trebled prior to the Reign of Terror, and one can only assume that when heads rolled, the gloves worn by both the aristocrats and their executioners were all made in Grenoble. For this reason, I always wore gloves when in the city."

This is a city's history in a paragraph, each sentence a century, gorgeous movements across time and space and industry. In Porthole, Joanna Howard beautifully traverses registers, languages, sensory experiences, landscapes, and media. The wonderful opera buffa of the main plot is a sideline to the opera seria of Helena's mournful questioning of her romantic and narrative choices in her films and life.

[Michael Doane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Porthole is a hallucinatory and vividly imagistic novel that captures the extravagant, chaotic life of art house film director Helena Désir. Joanna Howard delivers a portrait of an auteur at the peak of her powers, navigating personal trauma, professional pressures, and an eccentric circle of companions while confronting questions of creativity, indulgence, and forgiveness.

What stands out most is the novel’s sharp wit and cinematic perspective. Howard’s prose mirrors the lens of a camera, offering quick, precise glimpses into Helena’s world, from luxurious retreats to Parisian hotels and dressing rooms. The narrative balances humor, decadence, and psychological depth, allowing readers to experience both the glamour and the disarray of Helena’s life.

The characters are delightfully idiosyncratic, each contributing to Helena’s journey with charm, absurdity, and complexity. From twin Finnish massage therapists to a sex addicted chef, every interaction adds texture and energy, making the book a fast, immersive read.

Overall, Porthole succeeds as a literary exploration of art, obsession, and personal unraveling. It’s a visually rich, sharply observed, and intoxicatingly paced work that invites readers to see life and its indulgences through the eye of the camera.

[Jonathan Hawpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

8 & 1/2 meets The White Lotus in Joana Howard's fiendishly funny psychological meltdown romp Porthole. The monomaniacal creativity of the Auteur filmmaker is dissected with a satirical humanity that is somehow ruthless and caring simultaneously. If you have previously dug Mona Awad, Otessa Moshfegh, Miranda July's All Fours or Catherine Lacey's Biography Of X, get thee to digging this book!

[Patrick Cottrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

An obsessive yet capacious novel of intrigue and deceit, Porthole is a hilarious and exhilarating provocation about art-making at any cost and the gutting ruthlessness of power. Joanna Howard is a singular talent; her work is propulsive, kinetic, and laser sharp. She is a genius!!

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amusing novel about a female filmmaker experiencing a career crisis and convalescing at a kind of mind-spa that does a lot of memory palace stuff I'm not wild about in principle but Howard makes it work. Recommended.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lynchian — would be better as a film