The Near Future

Porter imagines a slightly off-kilter tomorrow in his latest novel (after Touch Wood), about a zany cast of character who shake up a dozy trailer-park retirement village in Manatee, Florida. After five decades of marriage, devoted housewife Lillian Margiotta walks out on her husband Vince, a retired Brooklyn cabby and unrepentant philanderer. Although Vince still hopes to win back Lillian, he goes on a road trip to Key West with a new lady friend, spinster Vola Byrd (a once-powerful but now-impoverished Manhattan realtor), his granddaughter Denise and her boyfriend, Tink, the latter a pair of smart-mouthed grifters hoping to strike it rich with a pyramid scheme. Meanwhile, back in Manatee, Lillian visits with Memphis transplants Brent and Gwen Runkle, who pine for the daughter they haven't seen in years and fret over an ""OIDs"" epidemic. Porter's intimate depictions of the betrayals and regrets of aging-particularly for women-are moving. But he clouds these flashes of humanity with overly artful prose (""Lillian...blots a fuchsia moue on lilac tissue she then lets eddy through a careless somersault into a receptacle of stiffened lace"") and wacky plotting (e.g. an incident with a gun-toting Gertrude Stein at a Hemingway look-alike contest).