The ghosts need stronger spirits
REUNION
By David Daniel
352 pp. Thomas Dunne Books $24.95
Reviewed by Steve Henderson
Creating a parallel narrative is a tricky procedure at best. For an author to create one story line and have it interest a reader for the length of the standard novel is a task, daunting in its own regard. To create two, however, is tempting fate. In Daniel’s novel, Reunion, he attempts to do just that. The story is told from two unique vantage points: Tom Knowles is a middle aged émigré from a small town in Massachusetts. He resides in Los Angeles, where he is an average (or below average, were he doing the telling) writer of screenplays. With one novel to his name, Tom Knowles is by turns dissatisfied and awkwardly exultant about his life in LA, a town described in glowing and authorial terms by Tom himself as the pinnacle of vapidity. When opining about the ease of canceling and rescheduling plans in the Los Angeles scene, one of Tom’s former classmates asks whether the cancellation calls are awkward. Tom responds, “Who calls?”
The other vantage point comes from TK Knowles—Tom at the age of seventeen. In this narrative, we are presented with a coming of age story that spans some of the darker and more turbulent times in American history. McCarthyism, JFK’s assassination, and the wars raging across the seas serve as a backdrop for TK’s youth. Arguably, the chapters which bear the heading “TK” are the more interesting. Teenage morality (or lack there of) plays a pivotal role in the youthful TK’s life. First dates, first kisses, and other more prurient firsts take on a nearly holy quality, as though these things belonged to some pageant of sacred adolescence. While some authors have a tendency to sanitize and through this elegize their created youths, Daniel pares down a significant amount of the artifice and shows us an adolescence more recognizable as our own.
The plot of the story starts out small, and seems, as one of the supporting characters might say, to grow exponentially. The reader is first introduced to Tom as he is traveling back to Weybridge, Massachusetts, to settle his mother into a nursing facility and attend his high school reunion. At this high school reunion, there is a lightning strike that sends the projection equipment into disarray and nearly kills our protagonist. It also puts this story on life-support. From here, the story spins out into a largely uncontrolled flight of fancy covering everything from time-travel to string theory. While I must confess I am not entirely understanding of string theory, I can say with certainty that the framework of the novel doesn’t support the wild notions that are dumped upon it.
It is there the parallel story line begins with TK as the archetypal small-town hero, with corresponding letter jacket, social problems, and quest for the opposite sex that sets this archetype into a place of its own. Shortly after the introduction, this football-playing clam digger becomes a hard-hitting social commentator in the school paper, writing his own column known as “Curb Feelers.” Starting out as a “sandbox” for TK to write his ideas and thoughts in, it quickly becomes a venting place for some of the oppressions caused by the “red scare” as it impacted schools. TK’s reporting ends with him running from a McCarthy-devotee truant officer intent on utilizing a night-stick for persuasion as well as federal agents.
With over half a dozen books to his name, one would expect fewer vagaries in the novel than are actually presented. This writing suggests a seasoned author trying to experiment with new forms and styles, and present a story that is patently different. While I can applaud this “scientific method” of experimentation, I might suggest a continuation of my metaphor: a good scientist always is able and willing to revise hypotheses. The hypothesis that forms this novel could definitely use some revision.
From a good premise, the story devolves quickly into an ill-begotten attempt to include nearly every genre into one. By the end of the novel, I was not entirely sure what had happened, where I was supposed to “be” in the reading of the story, or what the resolution actually was. Though the ride was enjoyable at times, it was enjoyable more for the clever tricks of prose that Daniel executed. When Tom Knowles returns to his hometown VFW hall for the reunion, he comments pithily, “that didn’t augur well; an evening of seeing ghosts would seem to call for stronger spirits.”
It is this reviewer’s opinion that upon seeing the ghosts of plot and form in this text, one would need the stronger spirits of cohesion and uniformity.
Steven Henderson, a middle school English teacher and an avid reader, is a regular reviewer for The Internet Review of Books.
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