The premise of Hannah Pittard’s novel “Reunion” seems quite unremarkable at first glance: three siblings are brought together by their father’s suicide, and family drama ensues. In reality, the book is far more complex than one would expect. The narrator, Kate Pulaski, is a failed screenwriter as well as a pathological liar, a reckless spender, a soon-to-be divorcée, and an unloving daughter. At the behest of her elder two siblings, Kate flies to Atlanta to mourn the father she largely despises. There, she is forced to reconcile with the rest of her family: in this case, her father’s four wives after her deceased mother and all of their children. Somehow, Pittard weaves all of these characters and their backstories into a strangely cynical yet satisfying story.
The most compelling aspect of “Reunion” is its unreliable narrator, Kate. The entire novel is themed around modern families and dysfunction, and Kate is the epitome of dysfunction. She cheats on her husband—whom she loves—but refuses to apologize; she spends all but her last five dollars on alcohol at the airport; she is only slightly saddened upon hearing about her father’s death. Seeing the world through Kate’s eyes opens a unique perspective to the reader. It is one thing to see her bad choices and conceited lies and their immediate repercussions, but it is another thing entirely to experience her broken thought process and feel what she feels when she categorically and deliberately hurts everyone around her. Debt is mundane, but hearing Kate rationalize her $48,000 credit card debt is oddly compelling.
Pittard’s conception of Kate as a dysfunctional character extends beyond the obvious. The reader’s first reaction to Kate and her narrative style is likely one of mild annoyance: everything she says seems to be taken straight from some recent, trashy, run-of-the-mill “page-turner.” At times, Kate seems to try too hard to appear nonchalant about everything—specifically her father’s death and her fragile marriage—while at other points she acts melodramatically. But over the course of the book, the reader learns to appreciate her for her rare but extremely insightful observations, which are only revealed through her emotional outbursts.
Some of these outbursts occur in the form of recollective anecdotes, where Kate reveals her experiences with a great deal more reliability than she employs in the rest of the book. She narrates about her childhood, the death of her mother, and her father’s subsequent wives, one of whom “was the kind of stepmother people write bad screenplays about.” The most pivotal of these asides is about how Kate herself became a pathological liar. It tells the story of her first calculated, conscious, cold-blooded lie and ends, “[My husband] says addicts begin to recover when they pinpoint the birth of their addiction. Well, as best I can tell, this is mine.” Despite being about Kate’s past, these short narratives are actually dynamic, as they show her personal growth in action.
In fact, “Reunion” is not just about family dysfunction—it is a coming-of-age novel in disguise. Though Kate is not a hormonal adolescent, she still undergoes phenomenal self-discovery over the course of the book. She learns to stop hating her deceased father through a series of events that reveal just how similar the two of them were. Her extremely close-knit relationships with her older siblings, Elliot and Nell, are broken and reforged, while she learns to cope with her in-laws, whom she never considered “family.” Most powerfully, Kate reveals and learns a great deal about herself through another character: her niece Mindy, born to her father’s fifth and final wife. Mindy is a six-year-old who is repeatedly described as the “spitting image” of Kate, and it is through her that Kate is able to see her own past and scars. These experiences lead Kate to conclude, “The most important thing in the world isn’t that I missed my own childhood, but that [Mindy] not miss hers.”
The one glaring flaw in the book is its half-hearted effort to try to be “meta.” There are thousands of books and plays that involve the first-person narrator magically being the author and, due to some force in the story, deciding to write the work itself. Over the course of “Reunion,” Kate, a struggling screenwriter, keeps in touch with her agent, who advises her to write a screenplay or a memoir of sorts about her father’s death and her relationships with her family in the ensuing days. About three-quarters of the way through the book, Kate decides that she might write a memoir and that it will start with the sentence “On June 16, at roughly eight thirty in the morning, I get the phone call that my father is dead.” Surprise, surprise: that’s the first sentence of “Reunion”! This seems like Pittard trying too hard simultaneously to follow and buck the trend—she employs a trite technique at an unusual place in the story—but it’s a far cry from the rule-breaking she’s done so successfully throughout the rest of the book.
“Reunion” concludes with a quasi-emotional ending that shows both Kate’s deep realizations and the lasting mundanity of her life. One one hand, she learns to accept how similar she is to her father and resolves some long-lasting tension she’s held against him for decades. On the other hand, she is left with a life to rebuild: life doesn’t suddenly get easier just because of the hardships she’s experienced. Her bank account is still empty, her marriage is still far from healthy, her life is still utterly broken. But that’s what “Reunion” is all about, where it notably succeeds. Though three short days may change a person, Pittard understands that Kate still must go on living her life, persevering as best she can.