Review: Novel offers a ‘Porthole’ into lives of the rich and messed up

Chris Hewitt, The Minnesota Star Tribune

“You’re a woman, obviously.” This dialogue appears on page 99 of “Porthole” and it’s quite helpful because, in the previous 98 pages, I literally kept flipping back and forth, trying to figure out the gender of our narrator.

This is interesting in a few ways. For one thing, Joanna Howard’s novel is a reminder not to make any assumptions about gender, something I’m working on. For another, confusion about the main character, a famous movie director cooling her heels at a weird-but-fancy rehab resort, is appropriate because she’s clearly confused, too. And, third, one thing Howard seems to be doing is creating a female character of a type we rarely see — one who exhibits the sort of anti-hero behavior that male characters in books, movies and TV con