Review of Reunions
by William L. Kutsch
July 2005
It's been some time since I've done this. Thanks for noticing.
My inbox was getting full from all the people demanding
a new column. Just stuffed, I tell you. I could barely
get to any of the real mail here like . . . ooh, I've just
won a free vacation. And all I have to do is send them a
hundred dollars? Boy, that's a deal and since it's on the
Internet, it must be true. Oh, but do I send my money for
the trip or help out this poor fellow in Nigeria who has
to move a lot of cash really quickly and desperately needs
my help to do so. He went to all the trouble of tracking
down my e-mail address, so he must be sincere.
Yes, this is the gibberish you've come to know (I won't
say love, I've seen the hit statistics . . . my mom certainly
comes here a lot, but I think they're just gathering material
to get my committed) and it's not going to get any better
from here. I'm sorry. This really is the best I can do.
Passengers who are unsure of themselves, it's probably best
if you disembarked now. Yes, while we're moving, I've got
a schedule to keep. The ground looks soft enough. Christ,
such babies.
What's that? No, I can't go away. I'm under contract. Bwah-ha-ha-ha.
So how are the rest of you out there? Dandy? That's nice.
It's been a month of total triumph and tragedy for me. I
think I'm going to make it a goal of mine before the month
is out to scare the utter crap out of a Kinko's employee.
If any of you out there are working in a Union County area
Kinkos copy center, be on the lookout for man interested
in rates for binding rather large bundles of paper. Real
large bundles. Like the kind that would kill small animals
if said animals were unlucky enough to be under the papers
when they fell. If you see that man, run don't walk to your
nearest lunchbreak. That's the best advice I can ever give
you. Treasure it.
But I think we're getting off-topic.
When I don't do this for a while, I have to work certain
muscles again. Just like anything else really, coming from
a three day weekend, I worked for six hours and spend the
vast majority of it on my feet and my legs feel like someone
took a rather large crowbar to it. Now, normally I laugh
at twelve hour days, so this is quite awry. And it's affecting
my concentration somewhat fierce. But for you fine people,
I'll focus. What was I saying now? Oh, yeah, getting back
into the game. A lot of fine pieces have been posted to
the site since the last time we had an update that involved
me and I will eventually get to them all before the sun
becomes a cold compressed ball hovering in the center of
a dead solar system. Maybe not long before it, but eventually.
I promise. Today we're just doing one, however. But first,
a day to day discussion of what my month was like, in exquisite
detail. Including what I wore. Because I'm so pretty.
All right, all right, I'll get on with it. Geez.
I relate to some stories better than others. That goes
for all of us. I like to read a wide variety of things but
the stories that tend to grab me and not let go until I
sit down and read them (I have customers like this, sometimes)
tend to be of the more fantastic type, not pure fantasy
(let's not go there again) but generally something
out of the ordinary. I like stories where people have to
stretch their imaginations somewhat, where they can dazzle
me with mad and crazy ideas and cause me to stop and go
"Where in the name of all that is holy did they get
that idea from?" If the ideas are neat enough,
I can forgive things like the plot being crap or the characters
having all the dimensions of a flat piece of cardboard.
I really enjoy those kinds of stories.
But there's another kind I like. The kind where Cheryl
tries to control her heaving bosom while she regards the
sweaty, rippled hunk of man before her, the way the light
glints off his muscles, the way he wipes it from his brow,
the way it's so warm in here she just needs to get out of
these constricting clothes and just explode with-
Yeah. Just kidding. But I'm sure that kind of thing has
its audience.
No, the other category I tend to gravitate toward are ordinary
novels about people's lives, the kind that are well plotted,
that crackle with interesting dialogue, that have something
just a little bit off kilter about them to keep me interested
as the characters circle in some kind of weird dance that
you know just won't end well. Generally a sure way to get
me into the novel is to have a writer who knows his or her
way around a sentence and can really pull out some fascinating
metaphors or descriptions. Margaret Atwood is good for this
(she's also good at denying her SF novels are really SF,
but again, not the venue for that debate) and her novel
Life Before Man is probably the most depressing thing
I've ever read and the most realistic and probably the most
distinctive thing I've read from her. I wanted to beat up
every character by the end, but of all her stuff, that's
the one that sticks in my head the most. John Updike is
another, he has a very cool, careful way about his prose,
spinning out the sentences like a master, managing to keep
me engrossed even though he's really only talking about
ordinary suburban people . . . most of the time they're
cheating on each other, which happens a lot in his books.
Don't get married in a John Updike novel, because you really
aren't going to enjoy it. I certainly wouldn't do it.
With that lead-in, I have to say that the phaser battle
that opens up William Kutsch's novel was well paced and
extremely exciting-
Again, just kidding. Mr. Kutsch's novel is definitely in
the latter category of my two favorite types of stories,
unless this is all going to turn out to be some kind of
dream from people who are in suspended animation. Or go
the Samuel Delany route and have everyone in the story represent
Jungian archetypes, reenacted by non-Earth beings who are
inhabiting the planet centuries after we booked (that's
the Einstein Intersection for those who require me
to footnote my references). I highly doubt that's going
to the case however. Granted, we're only on the first chapter,
so anything can happen. But I still doubt it.
I've said this before and just so I can increase my word
count, I'll say it again: reviewing a work based on the
first chapter is always dicey, since it's like taking "The
Last Supper" and judging it based on how well Da Vinci
draws feet. I'm sure he does that well, but that's not really
why you're there. Alas, I have to work with what I have,
and what I have is only one chapter. Hopefully more will
be forthcoming but that's not really for me to say.
The author has a real smooth style, it comes across as
polished and easy on the eyes. He sets up the premise real
early, almost in the first sentence, where he states that
the main character is invited to his reunion and that's
when the second half of his life began. He tells the reader
just about everything he needs to know about where the story
and sets it up in a fashion that makes the reader want to
venture further to see exactly how the character regains
his life, or reinvents it, or whatever he's going to do.
God willing, maybe it will involve kittens.
The initial banter between the son and his parents is interesting
and gives us glimpses into what the characters are like.
Robert's reluctance to go to the reunion is conveyed well
and made clear real early on, he doesn't even seem to think
about it very long. One thing I've always found in stories
like this is that the main character never wants to go to
the reunion, it's almost a given that he'll find some reason
to want to avoid it. Part of me wishes that he had found
a slightly better reason to not want to go, beyond not wanting
to listen to a "bunch of phonies". Is everyone
in high school a phony except for like two people? Because
that's the impression I get from fiction, that the main
character may not be the last honest man, but his refusal
to go somehow elevates him above all his other classmates
in their base desire to maybe, just maybe, see people they
haven't seen in a while, and that's somehow something to
be ashamed of. You don't give a damn about anybody in your
class and you never did? Well that's all right then, but
be a man and admit it. But don't pretend that it's simply
because you have to "keep it real" and laugh at
everyone else standing around with hundred dollar bills
shoved sideways up their asses while they discuss how perfect
their kids are and how many bathrooms their houses are.
You're no better, buddy and frankly, in five hundred years
who the hell is going to know the difference, anyway? Give
the man his Hummer, if you have to. But you're not too good
for the reunion. On one level, maybe it's better off without
you, pal. On most days, I hate people, but I don't
mind being around them and I think I'd get bored very quickly
if I were to isolate myself from everyone. And when a hand
is shoved out into the dark, you can't just slap it away.
You have to do something. You can't just stand there.
Writing works best when it elicits a reaction. We've all
been to high school (I presume, although perhaps that's
a false path to go down) and generally most of us don't
see the majority of the people that we graduated with, whether
by circumstance or by choice. On a personal level, I don't
talk to ninety percent of my class that I spent six years
(at least) locked up with in the same building every day.
The people I do talk to, I speak with all the time. And
eight years out, if a reunion happened next week, I'd probably
go. Because I'm curious. Because I want to see what happened
to people, who married who, who wound up doing what, trying
to match up the image in my head of what I thought people
would be doing to what they're actually doing. And of course
giving out as little information about myself as possible.
Not being a person who immerses himself in the local social
scene and doesn't work in town, even though I've spent the
post-high school years in the same town as my former peers,
I rarely make any appearances and probably have become on
some level like the proverbial Sasquatch, mentioned by never
seen. It's a never ending source of irritation to my brother
and sister that whenever they hit the bars around the area
they inevitably run into someone who knows me and speaks
both praise and unhinged curiosity. I'm lucky if they know
what I look like, anymore. But they remember me, somehow.
God only knows how.
But Robert's attitude is all too common, I've found and
I'm not sure where it comes from. I think, on some level,
it's a deliberate gut reaction to the constant notion that
high school is "the best years of our lives" and
that we're supposed to reflect upon it as a golden age,
a time when the streams ran with gold and the air was fresher
and everything was simpler. It's not, of course, I've had
ninety times the fun in the eight years that I left school
and my experiences generally stayed away from the baser
pleasures that college life and young adult life had to
offer. And there's a sense that by reentering the high school
doors you're giving an implicit consent to putting yourself
back into that age-old hierarchy, with its rules and insults
and otherwise nightmare inducing traumas. So maybe Robert
is rebelling against that, refusing to play the same old
game and let himself be dragged into the social politics
of the day. If there's one thing I've found, it's that everything
changes and nothing changes. People who were losers when
they hid your books in a random locker are typically still
losers. That's just way it is. But sometimes it's not. Sometimes
they change. Sometimes they don't change. And that fascinates
me, the fact that some people can't change and some people
refuse to change and some people have no choice but to and
it's never the people you expect. I like to see that kind
of thing, I want to see how it happened and try to retrace
the steps and see what caused it, both by what they say
happened and what actually happened. And I think to totally
ignore it, to say you don't care about any of it, even as
a glorified social experiment, speaks of a convulsive fear
or a lack of creativity on the character's part. Maybe it's
neither. Maybe I'm totally off base. We are, after all,
only on chapter one.
As we go on, it seems that Robert is trying to give himself
reasons not to go, to obscure his submerged interest in
actually attending. Curiosity remains a powerful thing,
the thing that leads us to question and puzzle and ponder.
And yes, it applies to reunions as well. He can sit there
and give a pat "I really don't care" but we can
see it's really not the case. For the first chapter, the
narrative only skims the surface, giving us hints of what's
going on underneath but not telling us the whole story,
or even a good part of it. It's revealed in the last few
seconds, a piece of paper scooted under the giant stone
pillar before it closes over the entrance, that Robert is
divorced for several years now and finds himself single.
He finds himself toying with the notion of trying to meet
an old sweetheart, seeing which of his former classmates
managed to retain their girlish figures. Right there, we
start to sense a direction to this story, in the way that
you can watch the ripples on the water and figure out where
they came from. A story doesn't begin at the beginning or
end at the end, but it erupts from the center and spreads
out in both directions, until it reaches a point where it's
so thin that there's nothing to see anymore and you have
no choice but to start there. At the beginning. So you think.
The thing with stories set in "real life" is
that we're never actually walking in on the beginning, but
coming in after the play has already started. I can start
with your birth but you are more than a screaming infant
with a funny cord hanging out of him, you're what your parents
sprang from, what their grandparents did to them. Context
is an elusive beast and you can't explain everything if
you don't know where it all came from. Robert has his reasons
and maybe they aren't good reasons but they certainly aren't
the real reasons. And it's those reasons he won't
say that will eventually draw him into the reunion, I imagine,
the same way that you can still feel a barb under the skin
every time you try to move, even if all you can really see
is the bump it creates when it's fully embedded. I suspect
he might find true love at the reunion. Or maybe not true
love, but a map to where the first steps might be (as a
defiantly single person, I believe in true love and even
love at first sight . . . even as I'm fairly certain that
the best I'll ever do is find a person who can tolerate
me for longer stretches of time than other people). Perhaps
all he'll find is a seamy, decadent one night stand with
the cheerleader he only lusted for in his dreams. Maybe
he'll help her cheat on her husband, who she suspects to
be gay. Maybe they'll do it in the boy's locker room, on
a bench where he used to sit complaining while they stole
his gym clothes. The ingredients are all there for a sexual
explosion, writers lay down certain lines for the same reason
that we put that needle in your arm to keep it open. It's
there to prep you, to get you ready for what's coming, even
when you don't know what it is or even what it'll feel like,
it's a marker and a warning. The gun's sitting there right
in chapter one, the notation he's a single divorced man
(how old is he, I'm guess thirty eight or thirty nine, if
he didn't stay back a grade . . . still in his prime, you
old stud) and some time before act three bears down on us,
that gun is going to go off and a spark is going to fly.
In a sordid way, I hope. The kind that makes us embarrassed
to read. Life's a train wreck and I can't look away, no
matter how hard I try. But the people who do look away are
the ones we bury, the ones who can't stand the sight of
what they see anymore.
The choice of first person narration is interesting, especially
in the context of a reunion. If Robert is going to the reunion
(and I'm ninety nine percent certain that he is, unless
the author can somehow make a novel about a man sitting
in his house and eating old pizza in his underwear remotely
interesting . . . I'd welcome the challenge, however) then
he's going to run into people that he used to know and we're
going to see a contrast between the way they were then and
the way they were now. And the thing with first person narration
is that it's intensely subjective, you're tapping right
into the thoughts of a specific person, sometimes to a ridiculous
degree but that's all you have to go by. It's quite possible
that the author is going to shift chapters from one person
to another as time goes on and make each chapter a separate
monologue from people all getting ready to go to the reunion,
bringing them all slowly together for whatever purpose he
deems worthy of our entertainment. Wow, I make the process
sound really cold when I put it that way, don't I? If we
stick with Robert's point of view, however, we're going
to get his impressions of his former classmates, filtered
through his perceptions and more importantly, his memories
of them. And as we all know, memory can be a faulty thing
and this sets up the problem where we may not be able to
take all the things that Robert is telling us (granted he
doesn't know he's telling us these things, if he did he
would be extraordinarily self-aware) as entirely truthful.
But that's the risk you run with first person narration
and something that we'll probably have to go into in more
detail when more chapters appear and we get deeper into
the story, as Robert interacts with more characters that
aren't his parents and who we might start seeing differing
opinions on.
I'm on page six and I'm fairly certain I have definitely
rambled on longer than the chapter itself but a little more
and I'll be set, I think. I wanted to make a comment on
the title, just so I can be complete (I should probably
save some of this material for later chapters but I don't
know when they're coming out and to be honest, is a lack
of finding things to say really a problem for me?). I think
when I first saw it I interpreted as "The Reunion"
and even as just "Reunions" (which it actually
is) my first thought was to note that I had the same reservations
toward it as I did toward "The Pedophile", that
it gave away too much, was almost too obvious in blatantly
stating what the story was going to be about. However, in
this case I may have to rethink my original almost-comment
and note that this may be one of those titles that can eventually
serve multiple meanings, with readers taken to believe that
the surface meaning is the actual meaning (i.e. it's called
"Reunions" and he's going to a reunion) while
it may turn out that it may mean something else entirely,
the reunion between Robert and an old love (or an old hate),
the way different perspectives collide in the course of
a night, the fact that perhaps someone once was separated
from something that he once held dear and over the course
of the story he's going to find it again. It may mean all
of these things. It may refer to other matters entirely,
achieving a poetic resonance far beyond what we initially
assumed. It better mean something else or I'm going to feel
really silly. Just so you know.
Since we're wrapping up, I might as well close out with
one final point. While I do like the prose and I have to
say that this is utterly subjective, I feel like there's
something lacking in it, a certain fire, shall we say. That
may be because the first chapter is mostly introduction,
but Robert's narration feels almost too chatty, too conversational,
as I said before, it goes down real easy and it's well written
but there's no truly memorable lines in it, no passages
that really reach out and grab you. All of the sentences
merely serve to move the story forward, which they do well,
but on a personal level, I like it when the words trigger
certain echoes in the mind. I'm probably used to a more
ornate style, and this here is a style that's suited to
mainstream fiction, the kind of course that sells lots and
lots of copies. Which is perfectly fine and the author has
to be cited for putting together a piece that is pleasantly
readable (a harder battle than many people realize, just
because it sounds good in your head doesn't mean it translate
well to paper) but in me at least doesn't evoke any greater
feelings (at least on a prose level) than "Oh, this
is nice". Which is why I'm going to great pains to
point out that everyone's mileage may vary. Also, I just
finished reading John Updike and that man could piss better
sentences in the snow than I could ever hope to write. So
next to him, probably everyone except for maybe Thomas Pynchon
looks a bit plain. And yes, I'm name dropping, but if I
didn't work the names of my favorite authors into these
columns you might think that aliens (or Communists! Beware
the Red Menace!) had taken over and were masquerading as
me. For what purpose? I don't know, it's not like I really
think these statements through. You figure it out.
For a first chapter, this is nice. It sets the main character
up nicely (if he is the main character and this isn't some
weird feint where Robert is hit by a car in the next chapter
by the guy who is actually the main character) and gives
us a number of directions that the story could go in. Obviously
it's impossible to make any firm judgments on anything relating
to this story because we probably have lots of chapters
to go. So I apologize if my comments were more rambling
than anything else, I was trying to riff on things that
the story might touch on in future chapters and peoples'
tolerance for that sort of thing may vary wildly. If you
don't like it, well, you might as well read to the end now
because you're almost done. Guess I should have warned you
earlier.
This is the foundation for what is potentially a solid
piece of fiction about ordinary people and the changes they
don't expect to happen in their lives and how they react
to such things happening. It's the kind of thing I always
try to write but always ruin because I start dragging in
all sorts of other weird crap, so it'll be nice to see for
once someone go and do it the way it's supposed to be done.
So go to it, William Kutsch. Go to it, or God help me,
I'll write another chapter without any punctuation at all.
Because, dammit, it's Art. Because I can. The world is depending
on you to stop me. Or someone is. I think. Sometimes I don't
get these things quite right.
Don't mind any of that though. Good job all around and
I'm looking forward to chapter two. And a raise. But you
can only affect one of those, alas.
Witty closing sign-off!
- MB
7.13.2005
"The real truth about it is that no one gets it right,
the real truth about it is we're all supposed to try..."
- Songs: Ohia, "Farewell Transmission"
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