Reunion by Alan Lightman

From the Publisher

Charles, a once-promising poet, is a professor at a minor liberal arts college, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Now living a desperately comfortable existence, he decides to return to his thirtieth college reunion. While there, he relives an intense love affair he had with a beautiful ballerina that forever changed his life.  At times shocked, admiring, and furious with his younger self, Charles remembers contradictory versions of events, until reality and identity dissolve into a haze of illusion.  Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the fatal power of first love.   

The New York Times

Alan Lightman's elegant new novel, spare, economical and charged with meaning, is a seasonal reminder that special effects can be luminously achieved without pyrotechnics. — Jonathan Wilson

The Washington Post

Lightman's delicate prose turns what might have been a ho-hum subject into a fascinating study. Charles's sojourn among the ghosts of his senior year leaves him a sadder but wiser man -- as well as one who can, at long last, feel. — Sanford Pinsker

Publishers Weekly

Lightman (Einstein's Dreams, etc.) indulges his romantic side in this fourth novel, coming dangerously close to mawkishness with a tale of an aging professor pining for his lost youth. Charles, 52, teaches literature at a small college; once an aspiring poet, he is now content to read instead of write. Divorced from his wife and not particularly close to his grown daughter, he is lonely but takes defensive pleasure in material comfort ("Do I lead the life of a selfish shit? So be it. I am content in my shithood"). Upon attending his 30-year college reunion, a vision of his 22-year-old self startles him into recalling in exhaustive detail the great love affair of his life. Juliana, a fiercely ambitious New York City dancer, bewitches him with her beauty, determination and sheer unknowableness. After he meets her at a coffee shop, he makes many two-hour bus trips into the city to see her, attending her rehearsals and meeting up with her after hours in the dancers' dressing room. On a brief visit to Charles's college, Juliana meets his wolfish poetry professor; some time later, Charles discovers she is sleeping with him, too. This dramatic if unlikely development is quickly followed by another, which threatens to end Juliana's dancing career and leads to Charles losing her. In revisiting pivotal confrontations, Charles realizes that he has remembered things crookedly, altering the facts to view his actions in a more favorable light. Lightman's re-narration of key episodes as re-remembered by Charles is a clever device, and his Vietnam-era scene setting mostly skirts clich . But even Lightman's elegant prose can't infuse the all-too-familiar love story with fresh life. Juliana is numbingly idealized, and Charles, despite his self-knowledge (or because of it), is frustratingly solipsistic. In previous novels, Lightman's scientific and metaphysical inquiries gave a bracing rigor to his romanticism. Here, unadulterated sentiment leaves the reader flailing for a foothold. (July 22) Forecast: Lightman's 1993 smash hit, Einstein's Dreams (500,000 copies in print to date in paperback), helped buoy sales of his most recent novel The Diagnosis (itself nominated for a National Book Award in 2000). His momentum is likely to slow with this latest, though the love story element may initially be a draw. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Lightman's latest novel returns to the theme of time travel first investigated in his best-known book, Einstein's Dreams. Charles, a divorced and defeated literature professor, attends his 30th college reunion, reawakening painful memories of the turbulent 1960s and the idealism of youth. Wandering away from the festivities, Charles encounters himself as a 22-year-old student and watches a reenactment of a watershed event in his life, his doomed love affair with a beautiful and mysterious ballet student. The crucial scenes in this mental movie are shown in multiple versions, first in the heavily edited form that Charles would like to believe, then in the more ambiguous, unflattering way that they actually happened. Charles comes to understand that this intense emotional experience was not simply the first in a long series of romantic adventures, as he has told himself ever since, but instead an irrevocable turning point in his life. If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should: Reunion is essentially a remake of the great Francis Ford Coppola film Peggy Sue Got Married. This wistful, bittersweet novel is marred by sketchy characterizations and a clich d Sixties ambience. For aging boomers only. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/03.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

What can you say about a pregnant ballerina who decides to have an abortion? Rather too much, as it turns out, in this fairly lugubrious fourth novel from the NBA-nominated author of The Diagnosis (2000). Fifty-two-year-old Charles, our narrator, is a professor of English at a "leafy" liberal arts college who revisits his past and raises the ghost of his callow younger self when he attends his 30th college reunion. Lightman works in some intriguing material in the early pages, detailing middle-aged Charles's interests in a biography of a sexually voracious but romantically unhappy German astronomer (who "made eros from science"), a fleetingly described feminist novel about women's friendships, and his own not-uninteresting ruminations about the relativity and mysteriousness of the phenomenon of time. But Reunion eventually settles into a redundant replay of Charles's college years during the time of organized protest against the Vietnam War: specifically, his love affair with Juliana, a gorgeous ballet student who simultaneously welcomes his sexual advances and holds him at a carefully maintained emotional distance. Charles is a potentially very interesting character: a collegiate wrestler and lover of poetry (his thesis subject is Emily Dickinson), but Lightman subordinates the more interesting aspects of this character's mind and heart to Charles's obsessive passion for the elusive Juliana. Occasionally, we get glimpses of the sadder-but-wiser older man observing "the beautiful twenty-two-year-old boy, full of magic and life and the power of not knowing the future"-especially in a climactic "meeting" between Charles's two selves. But there's too little variation overall from the centralstory's very nearly suffocating abstraction, sentimentality, and banality. And there's none of the conceptual excitement that made this author's earlier books so stimulating. Love Story for intellectuals.

Product Details

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Interviews & Essays

Reading Group Guide

1. Why is Charles crying at the end of the novel [p. 231]? Is it for lost youth, lost love, his lost child, loss of power, loss of the ability to feel, or something else altogether? Did he learn something during his reunion that makes him cry?

2. Charles muses: “Although I was prepared to suffer, it never occurred to me that she might be using me the way that Lena used Ulrich. . . . It never occurred to me that she might travel from one man to the next to avoid being abandoned. Or to avoid being worshiped like a goddess, a worship she both relished and despised” [pp. 128-9]. Is this a fair characterization of Juliana? Are all the signs of Juliana’s self-absorption [see p. 122 and p. 139] apparent only now to the older Charles, or did the younger Charles notice but choose to ignore them? Is to love, necessarily, to suffer, or did Charles just happen to fall for the wrong person? What might be Juliana’s version of their relationship?

3. How is the life of a dancer evoked? Charles comments, “Her life is so simple, focused on one single thing” [p. 87], but does he ever really understand the commitment Juliana makes? Would Juliana describe her life differently than Charles?

4. Charles reflects that “through [Juliana] he is learning who he is. He is her ‘sensitive college boy,’ she tells him. She says that he is arrogant at times but willing to admit his mistakes” [p. 146]. But the older Charles tells his younger self that his mistake was “[y]ou knew nothing about yourself” [p. 96]. Does Charles, in fact, ever learn who he is and why he is that way?

5. Does Charles’s reunion experienceconfirm Kierkegaard’s assertion that “Life can be understood only looking backward, but it can be lived only going forward” [p. 40]? Under this theory, is it possible to learn from one’s mistakes and to change the course of one’s life? Is understanding empowering to Charles or merely depressing?

6. How might one describe Charles’s personality? Is his description of himself as “selfish” accurate [p. 10]? Is Charles a sympathetic or likeable character? Does Charles’s personality alter from when he was a young student to when he becomes a middle-aged professor? Does Charles take responsibility for his actions?

7. Is the theory about “relativity of values” that is so attractive to Charles essentially a selfish one [pp. 6-8]? Does Charles behave consistently with this theory? Do the actions of the other characters in Reunion support the conclusion of Charles’s favorite book, The Morning of Artifice, that “at bottom people are selfish” [p. 96]? Is love necessarily selfish? How might the older Charles answer the questions posed by his younger self: “Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? . . . Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?” [p. 192]

8. What does the reader know about Charles’s relationship with his wife, and why does Charles (or the author) choose to reveal so little about his marriage? Why did Barbara leave him everything in the divorce [pp. 129-130]? Charles observes that his relationship with his daughter might have suffered because of his affair with Juliana [p. 225], but he does not comment on how his marriage might have been affected. Why not? How might his marriage have been affected by his affair? Why does Charles disdain the ambition his wife embraced [pp. 129-130]?

9. The older Charles recollects of his younger self: “Charles senses that he shares something with Galloway, some kind of dissatisfaction with life” [p. 57]. What other qualities do the young Charles and Galloway have in common? How does Charles’s relationship with Juliana compare to Galloway’s relationship with her? How does Charles really feel about Galloway? Does Charles grow up to become just like him?

10. Charles theorizes: “The astronomer . . . was a tragic figure of sorts. He allowed his personal pride to end his promising professional career. And there lies the tragedy” [p. 16]. Is Cunningham also a tragic figure? Is Charles? Is Juliana? Is Michael Bisi? With whom does Charles identify? Who does he admire and despise and why? Is “an opportunity lost” a “true tragedy” as the older Charles asserts [p. 39]? If so, is Reunion a tragedy?

11. In his narrative, Charles alludes to two types of power. First, Lena, who caused the astronomer’s downfall, discovered “the most powerful force in the universe, and that force is all the stronger for not being diluted with compassion” [p. 17]. What is this powerful force? Second, Charles attributes “the power of not knowing the future” [p. 161] to his younger self. How is this lack of knowledge empowering? Which type of power turns out to be the stronger one in Reunion?

12. Why is Charles angry with Cunningham for not understanding the astronomer as he does [p. 47]?

13. The older Charles remembers, “Still, there’s something about Nick that Charles admires” [p. 105]. Then, later, Charles recalls that on the rabbit hunting trip “He realizes how much he hates Nick” [p. 115]. Upon what is Charles’s love-hate relationship with Nick Blanchard based? Can Nick Blanchard be understood as a product of everything that was simultaneously good and bad about America in the 1960s? How does Charles distinguish himself not only from Nick but also from that period in America’s history [see p. 76]?

14. What are the different narrative voices that Lightman utilizes in Reunion? How do they differ in tone and in perspective? How does Lightman effectively convey the different points of view and attitudes of an older man and a younger man? How does Lightman transition from voice to voice, and are these transitions smooth or jarring to the reader? How do the different voices affect the reader’s relationship with the characters? [See pp. 26, 50-51, 74, 94 and 130 for examples of shifts in narrative voice.]

15. Charles recollects contradictory accounts of both his confrontation with Galloway [pp. 173-81] and his final meeting with Juliana [pp. 208-217]. How do Charles’s conflicting memories illustrate what he wants to remember about these events in his life and what he wants to forget? Why might he hide certain truths from himself even long after they are past?

16. What decision do you think Juliana ultimately makes regarding her life? Does an understanding of the themes explored in Reunion hinge upon her decision?

17. What does Charles mean when he writes, “We are all being seduced” [p. 23]?

18. What does Charles admire about Emily Dickinson [p. 54]? If you are familiar with the life or works of Emily Dickinson, do you see any similarities between Dickinson and Charles?

19. What is the attitude of the author, himself a university professor, toward college professors and college life in general? Are the portraits of Charles and Galloway flattering? What is the significance of Galloway’s argument in front of the class with the student assistant about the order of names on academic publications [p. 62-66]?

Read an Excerpt

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Sheila lies on top of me, snoring, her heavy breasts heavy on my chest, her stomach on my stomach, her hair damp in the afternoon heat, a shard of light through the white shutters she closes when we make love, the slow beat of the overhead fan, the tiny sound of a radio from the street. I too am falling asleep.

I fly above mountains, dizzy, frightened. Someone's arm slides across my face. What? What? An hour has passed, maybe two. I sit up on the silk rug, sweaty. In slow motion, Sheila kisses the back of my neck, stands, and stretches.

"I like it here, with the books," she says and yawns. "I always have. Have you read them all? I'll bet most of them are for show." Grinning at me, she takes a long sip from the wineglass on the bookshelf. I watch the amber liquid swirl slowly around her lips, I stare at her body, creamy and white. She is not unattractive in her middle-aged nakedness, and I think that I may even love her, but I am ready for her to leave. There is a certain book I want to finish.

Still completely naked, she saunters into the kitchen and comes back to the study with the portable TV, turns it on. Click. We are watching a commercial about deodorant, then a news broadcast of some hurricane in Honduras. Hundreds of men and women huddle beside crude shelters, children play in the mud. Trucks unload food and medical supplies.

"I'm going to send them a donation," says Sheila.

"Them?"

"CARE. Oxfam. You should too."

What can I say to Sheila? I am still half asleep, limp from our lovemaking, unprepared even to look out the window. As I rub the sleep from my eyes, I am tempted to turn off the TV.

The truth is, I feel no connection to the faces on thescreen. The Hondurans are just so many electronic pixels. I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

The Honduran women in their earth-colored shawls, the vacant-eyed men wearing their lopsided straw hats, are nothing more than bits on the screen, surges of electrical current, evaporations. I wish Sheila had never turned on the TV. I'd like to drift back to sleep, or read.

Sheila has been somewhere upstairs, rambling around in one of the rooms, and casually descends the long spiral staircase. She's put on a blouse but cleverly left it unbuttoned. "I'm going to send a donation." She raises one eyebrow at me, almost imperceptibly, waiting for me to say something or do something. I recognize this minute gesture as once belonging to my ex-wife. It was a sign that I was not paying attention. Unexpectedly, I find myself missing that little prod.

"You can afford more than I can, Charles," she says.

"Right." She is definitely trying to pick a fight. Could she be bored?

"Oxfam has an 800 number where you can use your credit card," she says. "Or you can write a check. To the Honduran Hurricane Relief Fund. I'm going to write a check."

"Go ahead," I say.

Sheila looks surprisingly sexy with the unbuttoned blouse. Her body is real, her body is not a digitized bit, it has weight and it's twelve inches away. I reach for her breasts.

She takes a step back. "Don't act like a shit," she says.

I don't feel like a shit. I've thought about these things. Just the other day I was reading some article about the relativity of values. I mention this because it applies directly to the question of the Honduran hurricane victims on TV. Even if they are not mere electronic data points, those people are not nearly as bad off as they seem. Because well-being and need are purely relative concepts. There is no such thing as poverty in itself, suffering in itself, unhappiness in itself. All is relative. Galileo, the physicist, was the first person to understand this idea. Absolute motion is unobservable. Only the relative motion between two objects has any meaning.

The great painters also grasped the point: the eye responds only to relative lights and darks. Look at the pictures of Corot, for example Landscape with Lake and Boatman or Château Thierry. Look at the works of John Singer Sargent and Frederick Edwin Church. A dark region of canvas is dark only by virtue of being juxtaposed against a lighter region. Or consider colors. For years painters and photographers have known that the value of a color is perceived only in its relation to other colors around it. With the proper background, a green can appear brown, or a blue red.

According to whoever wrote the magazine article, and I cannot remember his or her name, it is only common sense to extend the argument to human contentment. Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile. For a few days he will drive his new car slowly through the neighborhood for people to gawk at, he will race his machine on the highway, he will lovingly polish the hubcaps until he can see his face in reflection. But this happy sensation soon wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

Now I think again of the Honduran hurricane victims, and at this point I admit that I am extrapolating the argument on my own, beyond what he or she wrote in the article. Who is to say that the Hondurans are needy or unhappy? Needy and unhappy relative to what? The fact is, they are probably not accustomed to having much. Aren't the Honduran children laughing as they play in the mud? To me, they look pleased as punch. Very likely they have what they need. Leave them alone. I can't decide what other people need, only what I need myself. But I'm losing the thread of my argument.

"Charles, I can see you thinking again," says Sheila as she applies dark red lipstick, using her little finger. "You're always thinking. It's not good for you."

I write a check for fifteen dollars to the Honduran Hurricane Relief Fund and turn off the TV. Done.

Now we're eating ice cream, peppermint. Peppermint is my favorite, but I also stock plenty of pistachio and chocolate almond. Between bites Sheila draws on a cigarette and exhales in long silver strands. She wants to talk about a movie she saw last week, some romantic French thing directed by Jean Doumer. Although I go to the movies frequently myself, I haven't seen Sheila's film and can only nod while she talks. She leaves to get a second bowl of ice cream from the kitchen, I hear the fridge open and close, a spoon clinks on the counter. The movie will be playing for another few weeks, she says. Would I like to go with her Friday night? She wouldn't mind seeing it again.

For some reason I now recover the thread of the argument I was making before. The real point is this: I have come to understand my own modest needs and aspirations. More importantly, I have descended to the level I deserve. In the morning, before getting dressed, I stand on my porch in my pajamas for a few minutes and smell the new day before it slips through my fingers. I eat my two poached eggs (which I cook myself) and my dry piece of toast. I drink my cup of coffee made in my dripomatic machine, two spoonfuls of milk, no sugar. On weekdays I bicycle to my leafy little college, where I teach my morning classes. I make a few phone calls, meet a few students. In midafternoon I cycle home, past the well-tended gardens, the mailboxes on cedar posts, the two-story houses with their garages. Then I am home, in my own two-story house.

Actually, not my house. A small-college professor, living as I do on a small-college professor's pittance, couldn't afford this house by a mile. My ex-wife bought the house, then left it to me upon her departure. One of my less pleasant colleagues once sniffed at me: "Not all of us are lucky enough to have wives who leave us such splendid houses when they divorce us." And I answered, "It doesn't bother me one bit, partner. Perhaps you'll have better luck yourself the next time around." Barbara knew exactly what she was doing. When we split up, she took only a little porcelain bottle that we'd gotten together in New York. Left me the house, the car, all of the furniture, even her clothes. She should have taken her goddamned stuff. She should have taken the house. She got her revenge.

So I cycle through the neighborhood of successful lawyers and doctors and bankers, arrive home, and grade juvenile papers. In the late afternoon, I fix myself a drink, take out a book, sit in my chair. After dinner I work on one of my five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles of the countryside of France. Some evenings I don't feel like working on a puzzle.

Wouldn't my life be ridiculously extravagant to a Honduran, flood victim or not? Of course. The main thing is: I don't want to be disturbed. I have made sacrifices for this effete life of mine, at least relatively speaking, and I am comfortable. Do I lead the life of a selfish shit? So be it. I am content in my shithood.

"Are you going to your college reunion thing?" asks Sheila. She is putting away her monogrammed cigarette case. "When is it? Isn't it in two weekends, on the sixth?"

"Yes. Will you go with me?" I realize now that for at least the last month I have been hoping Sheila will go with me. I went to my twentieth reunion alone, just after my divorce, and it was murderous. Everyone was paired up with wives and girlfriends. Guys from all over the country who haven't seen each other for twenty years, haven't stayed in touch, don't have any particular fondness for one another, crammed together for a weekend and acting like family. Then I skipped the twenty-fifth, the big one, the one where everyone talks about their place in the world. Out of the blue, I have decided to go to the thirtieth, all of us now in our fifties, balding, becoming farsighted, jowls beginning to sag, the precise knifeblade in time when we have accomplished much of what we are going to accomplish in life and are just beginning to stare at the black pit waiting for us at the other end. Why have I decided to go? I don't know. I don't know. But I am comfortable, I will say to my classmates, extremely comfortable. I don't want to be disturbed.

"I can't go with you," Sheila says. "Why don't you ask Emily?"

"Emily doesn't like to go on trips with me. She says that she feels like a child when we go on trips together. I probably won't see Emily until she comes home next Thanksgiving. Maybe not even then. Maybe she'll spend Thanksgiving with Barbara."

"I wish I could go with you. But I've got a client meeting that weekend."

"Please go with me."

She hesitates. "Maybe I can reschedule the appointment." She looks at me sympathetically from across the room. But she has hesitated a few seconds too long, and I can tell that she doesn't want to go.

"No," I say, "don't reschedule your appointment. It's all right." Why can't people be honest with each other? I am not being honest either.