Reunion: A Novel

by David Daniel

Overview

When Tom Knowles returns to the Massachusetts town where he grew up to help sell the family house and move his widowed mother, he finds his high school class is having its thirtieth reunion. Without much interest, he attends, and finds his boyhood friend "Brain" McLean still living up to his nickname; Brain has designed a holographic show made from old films of the pregraduation dance they had.

The show is cut short by a fierce electric storm, but Tom has already had enough time to get caught up in both the old days and the present lives of his classmates. Although he is eager to get back to Hollywood and learn the fate of a screenplay he has written, he becomes more and more involved, not only in the lives of his former friends, but in the town itself.

In a parallel narrative, David Daniel gives an insightful account of Tom's adolescence: his dying father, his understanding high school teacher, and his contribution to the family by digging clams on the beach. Ultimately, Tom must choose where he will find his reality: in Hollywood or in the past?

David Daniel's latest book is a gripping read about the paths we take in life and what happens when we look back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466836228
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/13/2008
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	416 KB

About the Author

David Daniel has been a carpenter, a clam digger, a tennis pro, and an assistant in the Harvard Medical School neuropathology lab. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and at Middlesex Academy Charter School. His new book of short stories is called Six Off 66.

David Daniel has been a carpenter, a clam digger, a tennis pro, and an assistant in the Harvard Medical School neuropathology lab. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and at Middlesex Academy Charter School. He is the author of the short story collection, Six Off 66.

Editorial Reviews

Ghosts of the past haunt the present in Daniel's ninth novel (after The Marble Kite), a scattered affair that offers nothing surprising save for a distracting detour into the complicated territory of time-travel and mind-swapping. In September 1994, 48-year-old Tom Knowles attends his 30th high school reunion, where an old buddy, Paul "Brain" McClain, surprises the alumni with a hologram show featuring three-dimensional images of the teenaged gang at a high school dance, including the 1963 version of Tom, a shy would-be writer nicknamed TK. Things go well until an electrical mishap leads to the psyches of Tom and TK merging. Dual narratives then follow Tom as he attempts to find a "reconciliation of then and now" and TK, with his new knowledge of the future, trying to stop the local heartthrob from shipping off to Vietnam and having premonitions about JFK's assassination. Unfortunately, the parallel plots prevent either from gaining momentum, and the pages are full of underdeveloped possibilities. A strange literary hybrid of The Last Picture Show and Back to the Future, the novel ends up feeling both thin and over-crowded.
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