Archived Review:

(Note from editor: because Random House failed to respond to our requests for review copies of Reunion, we will no longer be reviewing Random House unless they are books we feel strongly about)

reviewed by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Jonathan Bennett, and Steven Galloway 

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's story collection Way Up has recently been published.

Steven Galloway has written two novels, Finnie Walsh and Ascension. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

Kathryn: Reunion is a redemptive novel concerning the passage of time, written in the voice of a fifty-something academic/poet, named Charles as he examines his twenty-something self. It takes place at a college reunion and is a reunion, not only among half-forgotten schoolmates but between the two disparate aspects of Charles himself, divided in time. Charles the elder grapples with Charles the younger and the recounting of a love tryst during his senior year with a beautiful but wan ballerina named, Juliana. It is a moment in time that forever changed the course of his life.

Lightman's thin prose gives the impression of intense clarity, a lucidity that somehow exists outside the author. Lightman: "Because every possible word is said and not said, every possible thought is thought and not thought, and what is not said is still there, like the shape of space around the edge of a leaf."(p.146) A character in another novel of Lightman's, The Diagnosis, loses all function and, during the stages of his illness, is reduced to a cypher tracing the shadows of a leaf along the floor of his bedroom. I offer this quote as a possible explanation of my next comment. There is a visceral quality to Lightman's prose that made me feel literally sick to my stomach. Having read the book twice, I am still not completely able to put my finger on why this is. Could it be the shadow of his story affecting me? The Platonic ideal, the absolute story that Lightman offers only subtextually?

Jonathan: I confess I chose this book for us to discuss because Bookninja.com seems a place primarily (although not exclusively) for poets. With the main character of Reunion a failed poet, I thought it might be fun—if not delightfully antagonistic—to read a fiction writer who has an obviously poetic prose style, writing a novel about the very moment where the young poet does not come-of-age as an artist. Moreover, not only does Charles fail as a poet, he goes on to become a professor of literature at a minor liberal arts college. How perfectly horrid. So, Reunion is a kind of anti-Kunstlerroman. 

K, as you say, there is something about Lightman’s prose itself that rather creeps inside one. It’s surgical but somehow tender too. How to characterize it? For me it’s as if someone very good has translated it into English from something else—from French perhaps—giving it that odd, over-reconciled, feel. Yes, you know, reading Reunion I swear I heard Kundera. Not Life is Elsewhere, as you might expect, but that one he put out in the nineties, Slowness: this, because of the prose a little, but also because of the temporal looseness and parallel narratives. In both books there is a simultaneous nature to the fictional world where memory is not memory per se but a live sentence, re-looping, eternally, in the background.

Lightman was, of course, a physicist before he came to his senses and turned to literature to discover all the really fetching answers. Einstein’s Dreams, Lightman’s first novel, was as elliptical and cerebral as one might expect. Reunion hums unexpectedly along the threshold of nostalgia. But he’s playing with it the entire way. With the way the young poet yearns for his own little piece of Degas in the raw, with the way Charles the older sees his younger self be played by a college professor just like he himself would become. It’s all pirouettes and mirrors.

K, two things. One, what did you make of our young ballerina—the hunger artist? Second, I thought it curious you thought of Plato. Did you read it as a realist novel or parody? I wondered a little if it could be a kind of morality tale? Warning, that if one doesn’t stand tall and firm and fight for one’s true destiny (i.e., a poet in this case), then one will be cast into a kind of hell, sentenced to an endless reunion with ones own failed selves?

Steven: I don’t know about that, J. I think that Charles did attempt to stand up for his “true destiny” when he asked his whacko dancer girl to keep the baby. If I got anything in the way of a moral message, it’s that heartbreak can cripple you if you’re a morose, self obsessed little shit. I have to confess, K, that I completely missed, and continue to miss, the Platonic subtext. Could you elaborate?

I think this book contains some wonderful writing. Lightman’s prose, though it didn’t move me to nausea, is utterly fantastic. The sentences are crisp and spare and poetic, never overdone, never melodramatic. I think he’s a hell of a good writer.

However, I have to say I didn’t find this book particularly remarkable. If we weren’t having this discussion, I would have put it down after 100 or so pages. I never really much cared about Charles the elder or Charles the younger. Actually, I found the character(s) pretty annoying. This is a genre of American novel I’m not fond of. I think that the middle-aged professor whose wife has left him looking back on his life novel is the American equivalent of Canadian landscape fiction. There’s not a lot in Reunion that Richard Ford didn’t do in The Sportswriter (which, to be fair, I’m not overly fond of either), probably better.

I found the story utterly predictable, and at no point was even remotely surprised by anything that happened. You’re set-up with a guy who’s going to his 30-year university reunion. Three pages in and you see this guy’s heart is not overflowing with happiness. The reasonable projection is that he’ll do some reminiscing at said reunion and in some way address his unhappiness. Which is exactly what happens. Then you get to the sub story. A kid falls in love. Well, we already know that this kid, once he’s grown up, isn’t with the girl he falls in love with. So it doesn’t take a genius to see that he’s going to get his heart broken. The particulars of each story are completely generic.

I’d describe the book as an extraordinarily well-written gaze into the navel of the pathetic and ultimately uneventful life of a myopic, self-absorbed poet (in itself, almost a stereotype). Thoughts?

JB: Is the reader to actually believe that Charles sits in a dark room alone at his reunion and, what: daydreams, dreams, re-lives somehow, his earlier years? Does he literally meet his younger self? I don’t think this should be read as a realist novel. Were it so, Steven, your issues with the plot and its predictability, with the whole tired American campus novel sub-genre, would be all that should be said about this book.

I’m going to argue that it transcends all this. Obviously the reader is asked to look on the young poet (he’s even a wrestler too—I mean pl-ease!) with the wisdom of age and see the boy’s torment for what it is: raw, cringe-inducing youth. Been there, done that many times. But I think where the book becomes a success is that it does not privilege the older Charles either. Age is no guarantee of righteousness. They are both flawed, both pathetic and as such the book lacks a hero altogether.

For me, Lightman lays out all the clichés here but skirts them, mostly through his prose style itself, but also through his meta-narrative technique. I don’t think he is asking us to feel either sorry for, or identify with either character. No, I think we are being asked to suspend our usual novelistic expectations. This book is a kind of underhanded parody—or judgement, but that might be too strong—whose goal is to show how, as you say Steven, that a “gaze into the navel of the pathetic and ultimately uneventful life” makes a damn pathetic and uneventful book. But only if someone else writes it. Because, paradoxically, I didn’t find Lightman’s book pathetic or uneventful at all. It had other business. The book was ungenerous towards Charles at both ages. As a reader I was left un-manipulated if not un-moved altogether by Charles. Instead of loathing him or the book, I found myself loathing all the other books that star “a Charles” but are not smart enough to see that solipsistic books about regretful university professors make sentimental reads.

KK: Well. Lightman is foremost a physicist. I'm sure he wouldn't like that ring around his neck but I can't help saying it. Formally, the book succeeds. It has an inevitability that drives and drives to its perfect ending. It's mathematical, precise. I finished the book and put it down and said aloud, it's a good book.

Back to the nausea, though. Here's this aging American non-poet teacher who goes to a reunion, which in itself is pretty unbelievable taking into consideration what a depressed failure he seems to be, who proceeds to try to access his man-child from way back when his stomach muscles were ripped and could attract a pretty girl, unlike his nowadays heavy breasted girlfriend who lies heavy on his chest (p. 3). Here's a fairly naive man-child who even as a youth made a fairly ineffectual knight in shining armour to a girl who anyway didn't really want rescuing. They get pregnant and he tries to capture her by obliging her not to have an abortion. Steve, I think you are dead right about him trying to assert his true identity here. But I don't think his true identity is a pretty thing to watch. He's a sniper trying to take someone down with him. He decides to relate to the creepy professor, an obvious mirror to his creepy future. He decides this because it feels manly and rubs his ego; he's been let into the depressing adult world by this man and feels somehow grateful. And about the ballerina. I found it disturbing that Lightman chooses for his main character's love interest such an obvious enigma. Nothing quite as sexy as an anorexic, eh?

In his adult life, he is divorced by someone who sounds really swell, a woman who left him a house that she paid for and he's surly about it. The ungrateful little... His girlfriend Sheila is too real for him. She wants him to cut a cheque for Oxfam, for the hurricane victims in Honduras. Charles talks of Honduras as if it is mere imagery -- pixilation on a TV. Only that which takes place in his head seems to resonate for him. Weirdly, The Diagnosis begins with a token gift to a beggar. I wondered if Lightman was making some literary offering to the gods before he embarked on his novelistic journey.

Plato had this concept of an absolute world where there is an ideal apple from which we all form our concept of appleness -- Is the young Charles a sort of ideal in Lightman's view and the old Charles the real one, the one who, when brought to the light, reminds Charles of Charles and so he recognises himself? I wanted to give Lightman the intellectual benefit of the doubt, I suppose. I expect he's very clever. Plato comes in a lot to The Diagnosis, by the way.

Lightman is a relativist, I think, well, if Einstein's Dreams is any indication. "Absolute motion is unobservable. Only the relative motion between objects has any meaning." (p. 6, Reunion)

Lightman's prose has something of that sense of relativity, that liberalism in which all things are equal in morality. It cuts its linguistic tension from that flatness but it also experiences its problems there. If everything is only observable in relation to something else, where is the centre? And if I really read the text, I find it misogynistic. If I'm kind and try to look beneath the text, I catch glimpses of this other story he's trying to tell. It is poignant, the story of an older man grappling with mistakes he made along the way. But I still find his shorthand for ideal perfection in this ballerina tiresome. It's too easy, like he's casting a Hollywood movie.

SG: I am not a person who likes to draw undue attention to my ignorance. I also don’t really like poking at a book’s flaws. But I’m just not seeing the larger picture here. I am not seeing the point at which I should have stopped reading the text as a novel, suspending my typical expectations, and bought into this meta-narrative notion. Not even in hindsight. Frankly, I can’t even see what possible clues exist, other than a nagging feeling I have that this guy is too good a writer to have written such an unremarkable narrative. Perhaps I should have read his other books, which I haven’t. Is this something that needs to be done to get this novel?

I agree, K, the book is technically sound. It establishes its parametres and takes them to their logical conclusions. I would argue it does it a little too well, in an almost mechanical way. The conclusion is so inevitable, and so movie-of-the-week, that it had no resonance for me whatsoever. I also agree that there is a misogynistic streak running through the book. None of the female characters had much substance, and were mainly defined in terms of their sexual relationship with Charles. At this point, though, I’m unsure of how to proceed, because if this meta-narrative exists then this is all irrelevant.

If, as you say, J, Reunion is intended to show me, the reader who’s just traded thirty bucks and five or six hours of my life for the experience of reading this book, that the sort of book this is just doesn’t work, well that just pisses me off. I, and most other people, have better things to do than read a work that’s designed to fail. I’m still not sure, though, that this is what Lightman is up to. What’s the point? Why would anyone spend the years it takes to write a book, particularly a writer who possesses Lightman’s skill with language, when the intent is to produce a work that will irritate people because its entire conception is inherently flawed? How do you walk into your editor’s office and proclaim “It’s brilliant because it doesn’t work at all”?

Or maybe he did. And maybe some people like this. Maybe they think it’s brilliant. Good for them, I say. Enjoy. I’m just not one of them. It strikes me as vaguely wankish.

JB: Steven, yes you are right, if one is going to wank one should not go about it vaguely. What’s my point? Let me try and get at it another way. Why did Lightman write this book? No idea. But Amlit is full of campus novels. I’d say they are a scourge. They have been so overdone that even David Lodge has made fun of them (note to self, re-read Nice Work—you need a good laugh.) And furthermore, why write yet another “portrait of a poet as a young man” novel?

I think Lightman’s project is one of distain for all of it: for men like Charles—both as his failure as a young lover and poet, and as his larger failure as a man—and, for Hollywood-hopeful authors who continue to write sentimental books about middle-aged college professors who get laid by young, pretty students. He shows these characters, and their authors, up for what they are: wankers.

The very idea that Charles should experience his younger self in a magical dream at his college reunion is a pretty trite device. That’s how poor an “artist” is Charles. It shows, simultaneously, how completely self-absorbed and untalented he is. We are supposed to see him as an impotent in every way.

As for Charles being a misogynist, well, I think it’s a big word that is loaded. I like to reserve the term for clear-cut cases because my fear is that it’ll be shop-worn right when it’s need most. So, in my mind, Charles is too self-absorbed to have much energy left to hate womankind. I think he’s at far greater risk of not properly getting to know the women in his life than he is of hating them.

Kathryn, I think the reason why you can’t quite put your finger on the subtext, the shadowy Platonic references, the relativist core (oh my sides), is because you’re looking for a novel that isn’t there. Possibly you’re looking for the novel that Lightman is parodying. I see Lightman’s meaning as right on the surface. I talked in the beginning about the prose style, the feeling as if it was translated; to me this over-considered workmanship is the result of an author who is exacting. He’s not left the “real” novel buried. He’s attacking the two sub-genres I mentioned earlier. It doesn’t have the usual sign-posts of meta-fiction I agree, but, at the risk of reductionism, this a novel that trashes nostalgic novels much like itself. If you need more proof, look at the final lines—which I won’t transcribe to spare folks who read books to get to the end. But Charles does not experience any growth. He remains completely unchanged. Stuck. The same as he’s always been. Any other novel would have the hero succeed or fail, or grow in self-understanding and reach out to those (in this case women) around him. He’d learn to give as well as receive, or else he would self-destruct. This novel shows how farcical an idea such as this is. Men like this don’t change. And novels that pretend they do are sentimental stories and deserve to be parodied, or at least criticized.

I think that’s it for me. I shall give it over to the both of you for final thoughts. I’ve enjoyed this a great deal. Cross-between a doing a review (bad) and a conversation over drinks (good). Next time, I’ll buy.

SG: I just found out we wouldn’t be paid to do this. What a rip off. I totally misunderstood what “reverse omnibus” means, apparently.

I’m clearly not a reader who goes for the sort of book that requires me to grasp the fact that there’s a meta-narrative (I’m still a little suspicious of the very existence of this concept). If a book’s going to have these levels, I’d say it’d have to work on all the levels for me to buy the concept. I’m not particularly fond of, sniff, “high” literature, by which I mean work whose intent is deliberately obscure. It makes me feel stupid, which I don’t enjoy and don’t need to read books to do.

With Reunion, I’m still not sure if it was just a poorly plotted work of American realism, or if there was something else going on that flew far, far above my radar, and continues to do so.

This wasn’t a bad book. It just wasn’t a good book. It didn’t appeal to me on very many levels. I do think, however, that the author has a superb command of language, and that if he ever wrote something with a story that has some legs it could very well be a good novel.

As for subtext, I was giving Lightman the benefit of the doubt. But I suppose being a good writer doesn't necessitate writing a good book. Reunion is pretty and shiny but it ain't the real thing. If I hadn't taken this discussion on, I wouldn't have made the effort to read any of his other books. It was Einstein's Dreams and The Diagnosis that made me a little more curious about Lightman's fascinations. Truly one ought not have to do this much work to penetrate a novel; too coy, no? And I would rather not bother unless the outer story makes it worthwhile. Jonathan, if what you say is true and Lightman is parodying just this sort of novel, then press your ear up to the screen for my big fat raspberry. Shouldn't a parody be funny? Sheesh. And if the subtext I'm hoping for is not there, then in the final analysis, I'm not impressed. A great writer without a story.

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