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Alan Lightman’s Reunion
BY RICHARD C. WALLS
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Reunion
By Alan Lightman. Pantheon, 238 pages, $22.
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At first we seem to be on familiar ground. Charles, 52 years old, unhappily divorced and an English professor at a small college, is being urged by his girlfriend, Sheila, to focus on some TV footage of hurricane victims in Honduras. Sheila is moved and wants Charles to reach for his checkbook, but Charles can’t get past the alienating glaze of the TV screen. To him 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." This is Lightman the soulful and poetic scientist and MIT professor whose previous novel, The Diagnosis, detailed the disastrous effects on one man when the amount of incoming information he had to absorb far exceeded the amount of incoming meaning. But Charles isn’t headed toward some blitzed-out breakdown. Charles is just depressed. He’s depressed because his life hasn’t turned out the way he assumed it would and because a 30-year college class reunion is looming, one he’s decided to go to "out of the blue." Soon after he arrives, he enters a sort of fugue state where he observes his younger self, and this reverie becomes the major portion of the novel. He remembers the 22-year-old he was, and his first serious love affair with a girl named Juliana. He remembers himself as young, handsome, strong, and intelligent, a writer and poet of acknowledged talent as well as a force on the school’s wrestling team. He also remembers himself as insecure, totally unaware of the brevity of this time of peak promise, and a bumbler who lets key moments of decision pass in stymied silence. Juliana is obsessed with being a ballerina; she’s punishing herself with overwork and pushing herself toward anorexia. Charles is in awe of her sense of purpose and also of her ethereal beauty, her self-contained poise, the way that "even in the subway car, she sits as if she barely touches the seat, a thin cushion of air between her and every hard surface in the universe." Juliana seems weightless, in the good sense of the word. But despite her beauty and grace, she’s as big a mess as Charles, and their romance becomes a collision of two groping narcissists. Charles wavers between a possessive love and a growing awareness that he’s having his first real Life experience; even when Juliana falls into the clutches of the dastardly but charming James Galloway, Charles’s American Poets professor, his feelings are equivocal: "I sympathized with him, as despicably as he acted. I understood that the world is made of the head and the heart together, that life is not reasonable but we must still struggle against life. I rose above the situation, like an eagle. For years I believed those things. What was I thinking? All of that bullshit rationalization makes me sick." The novel begins densely, moving among some of Charles’s classmates and their own obsessions and illusions, then thins out until all that’s left is his worrying self-regard. For a while, there’s much to admire, like the satiric set piece about academic pettiness that introduces Galloway, and the allegorical aside about an amorous (and fictional) 19th-century astronomer named Ulrich Schmeken. But the cycles of passion and fear of connecting that Charles and Juliana go through are like an emotional Möbius strip - there’s far too much repetition here for a novel so short - and after a while you start to feel you’re trapped in the mind of a slow learner. The idea of looking back on our younger selves and becoming aware of all the pain and pleasure that awaits us should, even if it’s as sentimental as an old Twilight Zone episode, have more resonance than this. Lightman appears too fond of his hero to wound Charles profoundly; instead, reaching for a universal sadness, he falls short and becomes maudlin instead. Alan Lightman reads this Monday, July 28, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner; call (617) 566-6660.
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