Sometimes you pick up a book, thinking that it ticks all the boxes before you’ve even started. Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey was that book for me.

Campus-lit. Tick. A story about a group of friends. Tick. A reunion (allowing lots of time for mature adults to reflect on their less-mature-selves). Tick. An author whose work I have enjoyed previously. Tick.

You probably know where this is heading… Despite all the promising signs for Dovey’s story about a group of friends meeting for their 15-year Harvard reunion, the story is disappointingly flat.

There’s a good, albeit ‘safe’, cast of characters, who represent the expected pathways of Harvard graduates – success in chosen professions; appropriate levels of disillusionment about life beyond their exclusive college experience; and one guy who sticks to his principles and works for public good (but harboring resentment toward his alumni who can afford to partake in $300/head meals). In fairness, each character is aware of their relative good fortune and comfort, which pulls the story back from satire, but only just. For example, queer couple Eloise and Binx (Eloise is a successful author of self-help books and Binx a post-humanist tech-whizzkid who is the beneficiary of a trust fund), are choosing a surrogate to have their baby as a statement of ‘morphological freedom’ –

…pregnancy should be optional, and outsourced if so desired. Like a gig economy for creating, growing, and birthing human beings, with the job going to anyone who was willing and had a womb and nine months to spare.

Dovey captures the dynamics of group friendships, noting that as with siblings in a big family, ‘…the configurations of allegiance and intimacy changed regularly, in subtle ways‘. She also captures the tension and pettiness of reunions –

The five-year reunion updates were mostly open boasts, about consulting jobs and law school and exotic travel. The ten-year updates were mostly veiled boasts, about getting married or published or founding start-ups or charter schools. At the fifteen-year mark, the tone began to change. The entries were split between those who kept going with the charade of their lives being perfect and those who were ready to tell it how it was.

There’s an attempt to add intrigue to the story by including the son of a Trump-esque president in the cast, Frederick Reese. This part of the story doesn’t really amount to much but maybe it would have felt more relevant if I had read this book last year, when Trump was a thing. As an aside, have you noticed how little we see of US politics in Australian media now that Trump is no longer a thing? Such relief.

Dovey based the story on her own time at Harvard – the character of famous actress, Jules, is based on Natalie Portman, and Fredrick Reese is based on Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law – both Portman and Kushner attended Harvard at the same time as Dovey.

The title of the book is a riff on Harvard’s motto (Veritas – ‘truth’). It speaks to the central theme of the story – the discrepancy between our private reality and public facade – and a reunion is the perfect vehicle. Drawing on the political, I also wondered if the title was a nod to the skewed interpretation of ‘truth’ in Trump’s America.

Ultimately, what this story lacked was emotional and narrative complexity, and after reading Fugitives, it’s what I expected. That said, it’s an easy read, there were moments that made me laugh, and I selected it because I didn’t want something overly challenging – I guess it ticked some boxes after all.

2.5/5 Recommended as a beach (or lockdown) read.

Mariam visits an ice cream shop serving a flavour that pokes fun at the President –

President Reese’s Pieces of America… As (pea)nutty as the president himself, with an aftertaste as bitter as the morning after he was elected. We urge you to try Reese’s (Broken) Pieces of America, and then do something about putting them back together.

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (August 26): Belfast 13°-22° and Melbourne 5°-13°.