Reunion

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.