The internet has supposedly created an eternal present, but this phrase is tailor made to describe the experience of middle age. It’s a time of reckoning, when you suddenly find that you’re living the future your younger self so excitedly anticipated.
In her novel Reunion, Andrea Goldsmith introduces five close friends welded together by emotional, sexual and intellectual bonds. Despite their closeness, each must grapple alone with the dilemmas that beset them at this stage of life.
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Jack, Helen, Ava and Conrad (‘Connie’), form a tightknit group at Melbourne University in the late 1970s and go on to study at Oxford, where they meet Harry, a rich boy from Adelaide. Their careers scatter them to different parts of the world and when they reunite as a group for the first time in two decades, some time ‘early in the new millennium’, they must re-establish and renegotiate their relationships with each other, as well as their own lives.
Jack is a scholar of comparative religion whose steady career slide is the result of his unrequited passion for the beautiful Ava, a successful novelist. Connie, a decade older than the others, is an ambitious philosopher and serial adulterer, while Helen is a globe-trotting research scientist determined to find a vaccine for a deadly bacteria.
Harry is the outsider in the group, an honorary member because he’s married to Ava. A ‘squat chest-of drawers sort of man’ who collects ‘corkscrews and barbed wire’, Harry is nevertheless practical and worldly. He has formed the Melbourne-based think-tank Network of Global Australians, and Jack, Helen and Connie have returned to Melbourne to take up the inaugural NOGA fellowships Harry has dealt out to them.
Reunion deals with the forgotten generation between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, ‘the post-Vietnam generation, wise to authority but not stymied by cynicism’. The four younger group members have been part of Australia’s golden age of free tertiary education, when university became ‘a promised land where anything seemed possible’, where for the first time at conservative Melbourne University, mature-aged students mixed with ‘throngs of people from Melbourne’s multicultural heart’.
But despite having discovered ‘a secret intellectual city’ in ostensibly dull Melbourne, Jack, Helen, Ava and Connie have been all too keen to leave Australia for the intellectual heartland of Europe. The globalised Melbourne to which they return two decades on is not the city they left behind.
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Reunion is long and ambitious in scope; the story is a bit slow to start but gathers pace. The novel employs a narrative structure that in some ways resembles that of Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game and Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. As in those novels, both also set in post-millennium Melbourne, the reader sees the world through the eyes of each of its main characters in turn, with the story moving forward as characters shift in and out of focus. However, the maturing friendship between Ava and Jack forms the novel’s emotional core.
Goldsmith uses these individual viewpoints to provide flashbacks to the past, sometimes the characters’ shared past and sometimes their individual experiences. Events in the characters’ early lives and thus the reader's knowledge of those events unfold gradually: as the characters travel forward in the present, they revisit various scenes from the past, using such ruminations to make sense of their current dilemmas.
Goldsmith is not a particularly lyrical writer. There’s a brisk quality to her prose; like Tsiolkas she’s driven by the urge to tell the story and create strong characters. You won’t get the taut conciseness of Helen Garner’s sentences here or the poetic lilt of Sonya Hartnett.
What Goldsmith does specialise in, however, is a particularly rich brand of irony. While she stays close to her characters, she seems at times to be viewing them with one eyebrow raised. The novel is Jamesian to the extent that Goldsmith explores the inner lives of her characters in great detail, affording their emotional responses the status of plot. The novel is also rich with punchy metaphors and telling aphorisms: ‘the future was like fiction … a ream of blank pages waiting to be filled’; ‘nothing was relative any more: getting a new job was in the same category as getting new shoes’; ‘this man and this woman who had spent years in a fine frenzied feasting on each other’.
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Reunion is very much a novel of ideas. One of its major preoccupations is the shattering of illusions that must occur before emotional maturity can take place. The characters endure many losses, but loss of their illusions is surely a major one. Jack has carried on an intense, mostly epistolary relationship with Ava for the last two decades, maintaining the ideal of a perfect sublimated love between them. Now he must face the reality of Ava’s reliance on the practical Harry.
Meanwhile, Helen, who has always viewed the scientific endeavour as a force for good, must confront the fact that her funding comes from military sources that could use her research to advance biological warfare. And Ava is forced to face reality far more harshly than are her friends, as well as the realisation that they cannot offer her the help that their loyalty demands.
The protagonists are the offspring of globalisation, having worked, lived and holidayed on different continents, but they are also the children of the post-war welfare state. This has diminished the role of class to the extent that Ava has been able to ‘transform herself from an hereditary shopgirl with a confined future to a university student and woman of the world’. Yet, having largely left their families of origin behind and forged strong familial bonds based on the life of the mind, it's perhaps no wonder that the friends view themselves as self-created; but this assumption may prove to be just another illusion. It is the non-intellectual Harry, a perfect fit for the times, who has brought them back together; and Harry – in a role that unsettlingly echoes that of the novelist – seems all too keen to control the efforts of his beneficiaries.
Goldsmith cleverly entwines this theme with the issue of creative endeavour and its sources, particularly passion and love. Jack’s career has stalled because of his preoccupation with Ava; but for another of the characters, an obsessional affair has led to a frenzy of creativity, even as it destroyed peace: ‘A bad love is very demanding. You’ll twist yourself so out of character in an attempt to get it right that the misshapen scrap you present to friends and family is hardly recognisable’. In some cases illusion can fuel creativity, but the death of illusion can produce its own breakthroughs.
For Goldsmith, the intellectual life can assist in the slow groping towards personal change that occurs when illusions dissolve, even though it is no substitute for that change. The novel is full of quotes from and references to an array of writers such as Rilke, Yeats, Wharton, Auden and Frost, as well as artists such as Picasso. Yet Goldsmith’s characters move through life, like all of us, partially blindfolded.
Overarching her thematic concerns is Goldsmith’s contention that civilisation and barbarism are not polar opposites, that to participate in one is to be implicated in the other. Goldsmith finds the modern world especially illustrative of this idea, and she threads the notion through her explorations of quotidian life and of contemporary issues like the so-called war on terror and the militarism that accompanies it.
To this end she ably constructs believable scenarios that reflect the complex structures characterising globalised life in the West. The trappings of the fictional NOGA are described with a fine ironic touch, its convenient ideological muddiness perfectly contemporary: what matters to Harry is not whether it is a force for good but that it is influential. The war on terror revives Jack’s career even as it threatens Helen’s; yet at a US conference, feeling conflicted about continuing her research, Helen revels in the civilised downtime her intellectual colleagues offer her, replete with the strains of classical music.
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Like The Slap and The Danger Game, Reunion is a novel that celebrates Melbourne, particularly the inner city so beloved of baby boomers and the generations following them. We shadow the characters as they stroll through the Melbourne Cemetery, loiter in the grounds of Melbourne University, get swept up in the lunchtime crowds of the city centre’s thriving laneways, catch trams along a St Kilda Road that was once majestic rather than commercial, or hunker down at an inner suburban beach on one of the oppressively hot evenings of a typical Melbourne summer.
The novel was marred but not spoiled for me by frequent minor lapses in diction and grammar. This could have been fixed with a good copy edit and Goldsmith has been let down by her publishers, Fourth Estate, in this regard.
Goldsmith refuses to tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; while there is a powerful climax it does not offer complete resolution any more than life does. Jack, Connie and Ava find greater clarity, while Helen and Harry seem to become more bogged down in illusion and contradiction. Although some of these five friends ultimately act more bravely than others, none is a hero in the traditional sense; instead, all remain painfully human.
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