Category: novel

REUNION by Alan Lightman

This short novel tells the story of a professor of English who on impulse decides to attend this thirty year college reunion. In the best tradition of college reunions, all his former classmates seem to be old, fat, and miserable, as indeed he is himself. He wonders into an empty room, and remembers his first love, who was a ballerina named Juliana. This memory sequence abruptly and unexpectedly then consumes the whole rest of the book.

If you think it’d be difficult to keep a flashback going over two hundred pages, you’d be right, but Mr Lightman struggles valiantly.

The memory is a compelling story: as a student he fell madly in love with this Juliana, who was obsessed with ballet. She got pregnant, and he desperately wanted her to keep the baby, despite the fact that this would likely ruin her career. She disappeared, and he never saw her again.

Most interesting to me in this book was Lightman’s concept of life as a river, which can split suddenly. You meet a beautiful girl in a park, for example, and do or do not take her number; and that’s a split. It could be your life ought to have changed, but you were so used to the path you were already on that you did even notice that the river had branched until you were too far downstream to go back. A very worrying and very probably accurate picture of the choices we make.

We’ve talked before in this blog (here) about how I really can’t bear a certain brand of contemporary literary fiction, which tends to involve excessive use of the present tense, a lot of prepositions, and the ending of every paragraph on a profound, or – just as bad – a poetic note. Curiously, this kind of fiction seems to be dominated by men, and Mr Lightman unfortunately undeniably falls most horribly into this category. I’ll let him speak for himself:

The four ballerinas move across the floor like a fluttering of wings, back and forth, around and around, changing shape again and again. At times they became a sequence of snowflakes. At times they are caged birds, beating for freedom. Angles and curves. Solids and lace. Filigrees of light trickling through trees. His heart cannot hold all the images and sounds.

In response, I can only say: barf.

BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

This is how Sinclair Lewis describes our central character, Babbitt, who, when the book opens, believes he is happy. He does what everyone else does, thinks what everyone else thinks, and is dedicated to material wealth and the myth of the white picket fence.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he righteously put in a complete sewage system.

His best friend from university, Paul Riesling is deeply unhappy, and when they go on holiday together to Maine, Babbitt begins to question his life. Says Paul:

But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun

Paul eventually shoots and wounds his wife, and this affront to accepted behaviour jerks Babbitt out of his stupor. He attempts to make some resistance to the norms of his world, and finds himself slowly excluded from that world. He is immediately unhappy. His wife develops acute appendicitus, and in sympathy his bourgeois circle opens a little to let him back in. He leaps back into their waiting arms, glad his revolution is over.

I love this:

Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves

There is some redemption in the end, through these very children, because the book ends with Babbitt supporting his son against all their family in choosing to get married young, and become a mechanic, rather follow the traditional route of university and a showy wife.

It’s now a commonplace that the accouterments of late capitalism – cars, shops, housing developments – cannot make you happy. What is interesting about this book, written as it is at the very birth of this kind of capitalism, is to see the very birth of this critique – when the idea that money will not make you happy was still new, and unusual. He writes about it terribly seriously, and it’s very sweet, rather like having a child show you how to ride a bike.