Looking back at puerile poetry and other sorrows

Thirtieth college reunions can be difficult, a time to weigh achievements against aspirations. This might prove especially hard for those who came of age during the idealistic antiwar Age of Aquarius. Last fall, Tim O’Brien’s “July, July” presented a depressing roundup of the Darton Hall College class of 1969 at its 30th reunion. Not surprisingly, O’Brien’s characters had been hit especially hard by the Vietnam War.

Not so Alan Lightman’s. For his characters, the life-altering factor is love or, more specifically, the challenge of loving selflessly. In “Reunion,” Lightman focuses on “the precise knifeblade in time where we have accomplished much of what we are going to accomplish in life and are just beginning to stare back at the pit waiting for us at the other end.” Unfortunately, he showed his preoccupation with time to better effect in his genre-bending first book of fiction, “Einstein’s Dreams.” His last novel, “The Diagnosis,” with its pointed attack on the spiritual emptiness of modern technological culture, offers a more vivid picture of disillusionment as well as a stronger case for stopping to smell the roses.

Educated at Princeton University and Caltech, Lightman is a physicist as well as a writer and is an adjunct professor of humanities at MIT. His first three novels are especially noteworthy because of his uncommon ability to act as translator between the often non-conversant scientific and artistic worlds; he is able to convey, in remarkably lucid prose, the excitement of unlocking the physical secrets of the universe. “Einstein’s Dreams” transports the reader to 1905 Berne, Switzerland, where a young patent clerk working on his seminal theory of relativity has a series of dreams positing different pictures of the nature of time: cyclical, linear, halting, backward. The book is an elegant string of meditations, the quintessential physics for poets.

Lightman returned to present-day America and more conventional novelistic form with his next two books, “Good Benito” and “The Diagnosis,” which explore, in different ways, the interplay between hard, cold science and soft, fluctuating emotions.

In “Reunion,” with the exception of an intriguingly quirky riff on a German astronomer, Lightman has abandoned science altogether, and it’s a pity. The world is full of writers whose subjects are the anguished souls of poets or painters but has woefully few who can convincingly convey the glory of logical scientific thought. Lightman’s narrator, Charles, is a professor of English at a “leafy little college” who put off his college science requirement until his senior year, then barely squeaked through biology with a D.

A glance at Lightman’s list of publications makes it clear he has spent his professional life trying to balance his literary and scientific interests. In “Reunion,” his personal tug of war is expressed in terms of the pull between practical occupations and useless pursuits. Poetry, his narrator’s first love, is “a form of perfection” but “as useless as ballet.”

By his 30th reunion, Charles has not fulfilled his early literary promise and has reduced his sights on all fronts. He is 10 years divorced from a lawyer who out-earned him and couldn’t understand his lack of drive. Their only child is grown. He tunes out his latest girlfriend much of the time and is satisfied to aim for comfort rather than passion or brilliance. “The real point is this: I have come to understand my own modest needs and aspirations. More importantly, I have descended to the level I deserve.”

Clinging to self-acceptance while confronting his mediocrity, Charles goes off to his reunion in 1999 at a college that bears more than a passing resemblance to Princeton. We’re mildly engaged by this brooder who ponders “the momentous choices” that “constantly bombard us,” and we wonder how the reunion will affect him. He reflects, “I seem to remember Kierkegaard or somebody saying that life can be understood only looking backward, but it can be lived only looking forward.” Like Bill Chalmers, the hapless hero of “The Diagnosis,” Charles questions the often mindless success ethic that pervades our society.

Alas Lightman takes a bad turn on page 50. Walking across campus after a memorial service and picnic lunch, his downbeat narrator encounters his senior year self: “And there, sitting cross-legged under a tree between Davis and Smith Hall, I see myself. My books lie scattered on the ground. I hold in my hand a letter from a young woman.” Through this alter ego, Charles attempts to understand his life not just by looking backward but by reliving his last year in college. Scenes include poetry classes, his marginal participation in an antiwar demonstration, wrestling meets and, most prominent, an ill-fated love affair in New York City with that stock romantic paragon, the fragile, elusive ballerina.

The result is embarrassingly maudlin and sappy, with several wincers per page. There are no senior moments here -- sophomoric is more like it. At one point, for example, Charles snaps back into the present and says, “What? What the hell is going on? Am I hallucinating?... Juliana. Yes, I remember. Everything.” And later, “My stomach. My stomach.... Oh God. I didn’t know I had such feelings for her after all these years.”

Lightman’s prose is spare as ever, but his usual subtlety seems to have taken a sabbatical. The minimalism hides little depth, and there are few revelations about time, memory or love. Lightman is using an alternate metaphysical time model -- one in which we can watch the past unreel before our eyes and literally reunite with our past selves -- as a key to the time warps commonly felt at reunions and as a way of reconciling past and present. “Reunion” isn’t science fiction, however. Call it a blip on Lightman’s timeline.