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Summary
Summary
TheNew York Timeshas called Alan Lightman "highly original and imaginative." Each of his novels is a new exploration of that imagination, utterly unlike the others.Einstein's Dreams, an international best-seller, was a whimsical and provocative tone poem about time.The Diagnosis, hailed by the Washington Post as a "major accomplishment" and a finalist for the National Book Award, was a disturbing examination of our obsession with speed, information, and money, and the resulting poverty of our spiritual lives. Lightman's new novel,Reunion, is a delicate and haunting story of how we shape our identity through memory. Charles is a middle-aged professor at a minor liberal-arts college, a once promising poet, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Without knowing why, he decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion. And there, he magically witnesses a replay of his senior year. Drawn back into his memories, Charles watches his tender and romantic twenty-two-year-old self embark on an all-consuming love affair with a beautiful dancer. As the two young people struggle to find themselves amidst the social and political chaos of the late 1960s, the older Charles recalls contradictory versions of his past, ultimately confronting for the second time a series of devastating events that would forever change his life. Written with crystalline prose, at once precise and mysterious, Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the impossible hopefulness of youth.
Author Notes
Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee on November 28, 1948. After completing an A.B. at Princeton University in 1970, a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1974, and postdoctoral studies at Cornell University in 1976, he moved directly into academia, teaching astronomy and physics at Harvard University, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the 1980s, he found a way to combine his literary and scientific interests when he began to write essays about science. He explored astronomy, cosmology, particle physics, space exploration, and the life of a scientist, writing about these topics in a way that makes them understandable to the average reader. Many of his essays can be found in the collections Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe and A Modern-Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court and Other Essays on Science.
He is the author of Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe, which won the Boston Globe's 1991 Critics' Choice award for non-fiction; and is co-author of Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, which received an award from the Association of American Publishers in 1990.
In the 1990's, he branched out into fiction, although still with a focus on science. His novels include Einstein's Dreams, Good Benito, and The Diagnosis.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Time and the theory of relativity fascinate Lightman, a theoretical physicist as well as a trenchantly inventive novelist, as does the continuum of reverie, memory, and fantasy that constitutes our inner lives. In The Diagnosis (2000), he considered this dimension of being within the stressful frenzy of the digital age. Here, in this tautly constructed and haunting tale of lost love, he tells a more intimate tale. Alienated, seemingly selfish English professor Charles' mantra is: I don't want to be disturbed. Then why attend his thirtieth college reunion? Lightman's stellar satirical gifts are in full force as he describes this pathetically awkward event and a strange tumble in time that causes Charles to meet up with himself as a 22-year-old infatuated with the poetry of Emily Dickinson and madly in love with Juliana, a ballerina suffering from every neurosis that punishing discipline engenders. Lightman infuses even the simplest scenes with quiet menace as he explores the cataclysmic power of both erotic love and shocking betrayal. Like the light beamed by a star that takes eons to reach us, Charles' exploded past emits distress signals that he is finally able to decipher. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2003 Booklist
Guardian Review
In a culture where pigeonholing is everything, Alan Lightman has one of the most enviable market niches: he is the physicist who writes literary novels, the poet-scientist who can speak to both worlds. He is best known for Einstein's Dreams , a short, idea- driven, almost plotless novel set in Berne in 1905. In the book Einstein is still a patent clerk, but working after hours on his theory of relativity. Exhausted, he falls asleep, and in each of the 30 dreams that follow, time defies our expectations in a different way. The novel itself defied the laws of literary gravity by spending 16 weeks on the US bestseller list. It was the ultimate crossover book: the chattering classes enthused about the freshness and fluidity of Lightman's language, the intelligentsia thanked him for bringing science to the masses, and scientists gave it to their children for Christmas. Lightman's later books did not cause quite such a stir, but he's been highly praised for the many essays he's written on science and the imagination, and in his novels he's continued to make the most of his two-culture status. His second novel, Good Benito , was a non- linear account of a scientist in love with rationality and terrified by the messiness of life. The Diagnosis , which was short-listed for the National Book award, is a ripping yarn about a man on his way to work who suddenly forgets everything about his life except his IT company's motto. It is a thriller that takes our favourite fictions about the information society and turns them inside out. His new novel, Reunion , is yet another complex time-game that challenges received thinking about identity and memory, but this time science hardly gets a look in. His subject is the human heart, and he drapes it with a thick veil of sentiment. He has his reasons, and very interesting they are, too. He keeps them hidden until the very last pages, though: you spend most of the book wondering where he's taking you and why you've agreed to come along for the ride. If you need a reason, it has to be his prose - it's as fluid as ever, if sometimes too dependent on words like "wonderful". But then there's his utterly unwonderful narrator. Charles is a 52-year-old small town college professor who has no passions in his life, and few illusions. But he is more comfortable than most - his ex-wife left him a lovely house that is the envy of his colleagues. We meet him in the study of said house, just after he has finished making love to his girlfriend Sheila. As she reaches for her glass of wine, she makes the mistake of smiling at him. "I stare at her body, creamy and white," Charles tells us. "She is not unattractive in her middle-aged nakedness, and I think I may even love her, but I am ready for her to leave. There is a certain book I want to finish." So imagine his consternation when Sheila turns on the television to watch the latest on a Honduran hurricane disaster. After some prodding, he does write a $15-cheque for the relief effort, but not before he's explained why he feels no concern for the victims. (Poverty is relative, and basically he's a shit.) As a final affront, he takes us off to a 30th reunion at a thinly disguised Princeton. Here he spends many pages carping about old classmates who are even less appealing than he is. There's Michael, who has achieved his lifetime goal of owning 27 shoe stores, and Nick, the army cadet who once expressed his contempt for the military by wearing a brassiere under his uniform during drill practice and went on to become a two-star general. There's Ralph, whose lifework is a book on a little known astronomer that sold fewer than two copies. The only character you feel for is Michael the shoeman's bored and hostile Brillo-haired wife, who takes off her own shoes at every opportunity to massage her sore, red feet. But then the bottom falls out of the present and our Charles comes face to face with the younger, better man he once was. And suddenly we are reliving his last year at university, and his love affair with a beautiful ballet dancer called Juliana. Bathos threatens, as does unintended farce, but something rather unusual happens to the shrivelled soul that is Charles as he plunges back into memories he thought he had buried for ever. The story never goes where you expect it to - each new scene reads like an evasion, a deliberating missing of the point. The plot is a maze, and the elegance of its construction is only evident when Charles has led us to a bitter end that makes a travesty of the title. The death of the heart has, it's true, been done to death; but this one stings in its own special way. Having made it to the end, I am full of admiration for it. But if I had been reading purely for pleasure I am sure I would have thrown it across the room before the second paragraph. Maureen Freely's books include The Parent Trap (Virago). To order Reunion for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-lightman.1 In a culture where pigeonholing is everything, [Alan Lightman] has one of the most enviable market niches: he is the physicist who writes literary novels, the poet-scientist who can speak to both worlds. He is best known for Einstein's Dreams , a short, idea- driven, almost plotless novel set in Berne in 1905. In the book Einstein is still a patent clerk, but working after hours on his theory of relativity. Exhausted, he falls asleep, and in each of the 30 dreams that follow, time defies our expectations in a different way. The novel itself defied the laws of literary gravity by spending 16 weeks on the US bestseller list. It was the ultimate crossover book: the chattering classes enthused about the freshness and fluidity of Lightman's language, the intelligentsia thanked him for bringing science to the masses, and scientists gave it to their children for Christmas. - Maureen Freely.
Kirkus Review
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 central story'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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 the screen. 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. Excerpted from Reunion by Alan P. Lightman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
