The curator and fashion critic’s debut novel explores the potential for individuals and groups to construct and maintain their own worlds
Curator and fashion critic Charlie Porter’s first novel is about Johnny and Jerry. It is about seeing and being seen. It’s about British society. It’s about life lived between the potential of youth and the eradication of that potential at life’s end. It’s about what remains after that. ‘Let me sort through who I am…’ it begins. And obviously it’s about that too: about how identities, both personal and communal are constructed, and about the potential for individuals and groups to construct and maintain their own worlds. As the novel progresses this potential is explored through the mediums of furniture design, communal living, music, clubbing, gardening, activism, casual sex, love and care.
Narrated by Johnny, the novel opens in a present in which Jerry (16 years his partner’s senior) is long dead, from an HIV-related illness. Johnny lives in the London apartment they once shared and is keeping Jerry’s spirit alive by maintaining the rituals they once enjoyed. Even as the world around him is undergoing rapid change. Because of the shifting tensions between a life that is alternately invisible, repressed, illicit, queer and normal. And because of new housing developments.
Just short of mannered, Porter’s prose is studded with long, unpunctuated sentences that coil around what is trying to be said, constantly refining and restating it, like some ouroboros munching its tail. That mixed with short, factual statements that give the whole an insistent and eventually gripping rhythm. It’s as if the right words are both present and elusive, reflecting the existential shifts of the novel’s central characters between certainty and uncertainty.
At one point Johnny recalls Jerry’s discourse on the music of ‘black, queer geniuses’: ‘that’s what makes it so potent, he’d say, so alive, it’s by the marginalized, this was their outlet, this was a place of expression, they could create their own world, some could, not all, not most, some could escape, for a while, never really free, what they did, what they made.’ One might say the same of Porter’s intriguing novel too.
Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter. Particular Books, £18.99 (hardcover)
From the May 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
