There’s much fanfare at college reunions — banners and big hugs and so on — but there’s at least as much drama swirling under the surface: catching up with former classmates forces attendees to consider how their own accomplishments measure up. A reunion is a “take-stock event,” in the words of one character in Elise Juska’s stock-taking third novel, “Reunion,” a painstakingly etched story about the endurance of friendship, the cost of truth telling and the double-edgedness of nostalgia.

“Reunion,” By Elise Juska. Harper, Hardcover, 304 pages. $27.99
The novel opens in June 2021, 15 months into the COVID pandemic, when those who have been largely housebound are starting to come out of hiding. One enticement to return to the social world: the Walthrop College class of 1995’s 26th reunion. (It’s actually the class’s one-year-postponed 25th.) Located in the gentrifying (and fictional) Sewall, Maine, Walthrop is a modest-scale, competitive liberal-arts college on an attractive parcel of land — a New England classic.
Attending the reunion will be three friends who take turns with the novel’s point of view. First up is the Pollyannaish Hope Richardson (née Stokes), who worked in PR until her first child was born and she became a full-time power mom. (She resolved that “if she wasn’t working, she would do an extra-good job at everything else.”) Hope lives outside Philadelphia with her workaholic and generally unhelpful husband, a university dean; their age-appropriately sassy 14-year-old daughter; and their six-year-old son, whose already-present anxieties were only exacerbated by the pandemic.
Naturally, Hope is going to her college reunion — as her daughter puts it, Hope is “obsessed” with Walthrop. But this doesn’t mean that Hope isn’t stuck with a double dose of guilt — about leaving her family behind and about having secretly engineered it so she could attend the reunion without them. As she will inform another reunion attendee, “I haven’t had a moment to myself in over a year.”
Polly Gesauldi, Hope’s college roommate for all four years and still one of her closest friends, would probably do the mother of all eye rolls if she knew that Hope regularly participates in something called Zoom Moms’ Night Out. “A stay-at-home mom?” Polly asked Hope when she first learned of her friend’s decision. “Is that as thankless as it sounds?” Polly is a harum-scarum Brooklyn-dwelling adjunct college instructor whose son is off to art school in the fall. She has raised him alone, then and now living on the financial margins, and she is well aware that at Walthrop she was the only one among her friends with student loans.
Polly went to her fifth-year reunion but hasn’t attended one since, for a chilling reason that Juska reveals incrementally. Broody and aloof in college and at present, Polly knows that she will appear to have fared poorly in the eyes of her classmates, but she’s driving to the reunion anyway because her son, whose everyday disaffection was hardly improved by lockdown, wants to visit a camp friend who lives not far from Walthrop, and she can drop him off on the way.
While it grates on Polly that Hope insists on speaking in only glowing terms — about Walthrop, about her life — Adam Dalton, who completes the friendship trio, accepts that smiling is, as he views it, Hope’s “default expression.” At Walthrop, Adam was a daredevilish party bro; now he’s an environmental lawyer who a few years earlier chucked city living for the wilds of New Hampshire, where he found a job and lives in a big television-free farmhouse with his wife and five-year-old twins. Like Hope, Adam feels guilty about leaving his family behind to attend the reunion, but for a different and darker reason.
Like a dutiful reunion organizer, Juska has done a lot of prep work: she spends the first third of the book setting the scene before the three friends are finally together on campus, where there is abundant drinking and some, but not much, action. As the three friends interact, amongst themselves and with others, some secrets hum underneath the surface and some lies buzz on top of it, providing a bit of intrigue, but readers shouldn’t come to “Reunion” expecting much by way of plot.
Of course, real reunions shouldn’t be eventful: if they are, that probably means something has gone awry. As for readers attending Juska’s “Reunion,” they will have a good time but may wish for a few more surprises. At the end of the book, there’s a crisis whose outcome is never in doubt, but overall, “Reunion” is a novel whose story unfolds internally — that is, underneath the reunion name tags and smiles, genuine or otherwise.
Nell Beram is coauthor of “Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies.” Her work has recently appeared in “The New Yorker” and at Salon and Shelf Awareness.
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