"The Portable Son" is a collection of linked short stories in the tradition of early Updike, the Michigan-era Hemingway, and Stuart Dybek-stories of sensitive boys bumbling between friends and women. Here the milieu is the contemporary South, but not the South of degenerate freaks and cartoonish rednecks, but rather the polite, well-behaved South, the South of relentless good manners, the South of Polo shirts and thank-you notes, the South that no one else writes about.