Book Review: ‘Reunion,’ by Elise Juska

REUNION, by Elise Juska

As the premise for a novel, a class reunion offers fertile literary ground. Characters consumed with memories of youth while reckoning with what they thought they’d become versus where they actually ended up are prime for development and growth. The complexities of spouses, children and careers (or lack thereof) accumulated since graduation are further sources of narrative conflict. Add a plot point or two, ramp up the tension and you have all the ingredients for drama.

What about a pandemic — is that a compelling plot point?

Because “Reunion,” Elise Juska’s third novel, is set in June 2021, Covid-19 plays a significant role. The novel opens into a version of that summer virtually indistinguishable from the one we lived through, when the virus had wreaked havoc for 16 months and most sentient humans were exhausted, miserable and floundering. For those who wish to return to that not-so-distant past, “Reunion” will deliver you back to the stop-start malaise of peak pandemic life. The question is, who truly wants to go back there?

Maybe this isn’t a fair question. I honestly can’t make up my mind if the Covid-19-ness of this novel holds it back or gives it a hook. “Reunion,” after all, offers an engaging story. Narrated by Hope, Polly and Adam, three 40-somethings who met at Walthrop College, the novel follows domestic dilemmas and angst as their 25th reunion looms. (Walthrop and its town of Sewall are fictional, though anyone who is familiar with Maine will recognize Bowdoin and Brunswick.)

Hope’s marriage is buckling under the pressure of lockdown with two children, Adam’s wife seems poised to fall into an agoraphobic, anti-vax doom spiral, and Polly’s return to her alma mater is fraught thanks to a painful secret concerning a former professor. These protagonists are likable even as their flaws are on full display. Hope’s oft-repeated line — “You can only do what you can do” — speaks to the gentleness of the novel as a whole. It’s as cozy as a rainy summer weekend in midcoast Maine.

Juska’s characters are focused on their own problems while the pandemic rages on. (There’s a “Covid bubble” metaphor in here somewhere.) They struggle to communicate with their spouses, with one another. Conversations are cut short when the mood turns tense. Text messages go unanswered. Marital problems aren’t resolved. Hope, Polly and Adam think about their children constantly but, as characters, those children aren’t given space to develop. They appear in meltdown phone calls, sources of worry for their endlessly stressed-out parents.

I don’t know, is it cruel of me to judge? I suppose none of us were at our best in 2021.

Even as I tried to extend the same generosity that the story grants its characters, I found myself nitpicking their behavior in a way I associate with social media, not novels. Could this be a side effect of “Reunion” being so true to life, set in a world with not only the same pandemic we experienced, but also the same algorithmic feeds we scrolled? All those takes, screeds and scolds are somehow baked into the text. You revisit the fury of them when Hope waffles over whether to tip the masked caterer serving her cocktail — an example of Covid-era etiquette so prime for judgment, it feels taken from a 2021 Twitter thread.

The question of how to handle the pandemic in fiction is complicated. Are we obligated to include it in our novels? Is there any way to write about it that doesn’t make readers’ eyes glaze over? I’m not sure how much power Covid holds as a source of narrative tension in 2024. Perhaps as novelists we need a few more years before we’re able to reflect, invent and make that period our own.

REUNION | By Elise Juska | Harper | 304 pp. | $27.99