Stories of reuniting after graduation

My college reunion was a casualty of the pandemic this summer, like so many other gatherings. I went to a small Franciscan university in western New York and since I moved west a month after graduation, I’ve never made it back.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing if Laurie Elizabeth Flynn’s fictional rendering of a 10-year reunion at Wesleyan College in “The Girls Are All So Nice Here” is true to type.

And it might be because the way Flynn writes the complicated relationship between a toxic mean girl named Sully, and her acolyte, Ambrosia Wellington, felt disturbingly real to me.

I knew girls like the bored, contemptuous, ruinous Sully. They lived on my dorm floor and swirled around campus in the middle of a knot of courtiers and admirers.

My next reunion novel is Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Pastoral.” Now, I don’t like a lot of the late Mr. Roth’s writing. It’s just not for me. But this one is remarkable.

Narrated by a character who idolized the golden boy of a Newark, N.J., high school, known as The Swede, and bookended by the setting of a 45th high school reunion, we learn how disappointed and diminished the star student’s life has become, particularly when his daughter is involved in an act of domestic terrorism.

Finally, something less dark but still meaty in the reunion genre: Jennifer Weiner’s “Best Friends Forever.” The bond between Addie and Valerie has ruptured their senior year of high school and Addy hasn’t seen her former best friend since then.

But when Valerie knocks on her door, bloodied and panicked after their high school reunion, Addy fires up her best friend superpowers and the two are a team again.

My Thread Must Read reunion novels are: “The Girls Are All So Nice Here” by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and “Best Friends Forever” by Jennifer Weiner.