REUNION

Heightened emotional tensions caused by Covid-19 add an interesting twist to Juska’s story of friends gathering for a college reunion in 2021.

The framework is familiar: Adults with unsatisfactory lives attend a reunion where they interact with people they once loved, hated, admired, or were mean to; recognizing the dissonance between themselves then and now leads to inner growth. But Covid has forced members of Walthrop’s class of 1995 to return to the Maine liberal arts college one year late for their 25th reunion. Between drinking beer and making jokey banter about youthful antics, the gathered characters evoke Americans’ post-lockdown mood of exhaustion and general unease. Hope, Polly, and Adam, the three friends who take turns narrating, were famously close in college. Although they’ve stayed in touch, their lives have diverged. Hope, once a self-confident student, has become an anxious stay-at-home suburban mom who pretends tense undercurrents in her family life don’t exist. (Her charmingly snarky teenage daughter is the book’s most entertaining character.) Fellow students had considered Polly intimidatingly cool, but as a working-class Brooklyn girl she “often felt like an outlier” at preppy Walthrop; now an adjunct college instructor, she lives back in Brooklyn with her teenage son, Jonah, and has never told Hope, her supposed best friend, the truth about Jonah’s conception or his father’s identity. Dangerously wild in college, environmental lawyer Adam has evolved into a devoted family man in rural New Hampshire, but the deepening depression and agoraphobia his wife has exhibited since Covid are growing burdens. As the weekend progresses, the three friends mostly avoid delving below the surface of things until events bring each to a point of crisis and they begin reconnecting. The problem is that, given their undiscussed, long-standing resentments, the two women’s friendship is never convincing, and maintaining their relationships never seems a high priority to Adam. What works in this novel is how Juska keeps the Covid cloud hovering in readers’ minds without overkill.

A pleasant but predictable read.