Imagine what Proust would have done with a high-school reunion

For older writers, high-school reunions are an irresistibly tempting and alluring theme, setting, "meme" for short fiction - the blending of past and present, the exploration of memory and desire, the inevitable meditations on aging, on death, on the course of a lifetime, the admixture or sorrow and sweetness. Two of our greatest American writers have written beautifully about reunions - Updike (esp. in My Father's Tears) and Roth (in American Pastoral, I think, though maybe not) - following one of my h.s. reunions I sent copies of each to dear friend RSS to help him, us work through some of the feelings and disappointments evoked. Too bad reunions are such an American phenomenon. Just imagine what Proust would have done with a high-school reunion! (They're also good material for films, though usually in a comic vein.) Paul Theroux's story in the current New Yorker, The Furies, takes a somewhat different tack on this material - not entirely successful but worth reading to see how this familiar microgenre can yield new ore. His protagonist is a 50ish dentist who has unceremoniously dumped his wife (funny how this echoes novel I'd been reading, The Days of Abandonment) and takes on a new trophy wife, his hot young(ish) hygienist - so pathetic it's almost a cliche (not of literature but of life). His wife puts a curse on his head when he abandons her - and the curse is fulfilled through the reunion and afterwards as all of his former girlfriends/lovers accost him, torment him with guilt and humiliation, eventually drive his new marriage into a ditch. So this is a reunion story that uses a bit of the supernatural; the conflicts with past lovers are not really typical of the mood of a reunion, where by and large all is forgiven and laughed about - so I don't take this story as an attempt at realism. But I do think Theroux's view is a little schematic - it might be better if his dentist weren't such a total schmuck and if he tried in some way to defend himself and his new relationship - and for some reason Theroux is not at all interested in the mood of the reunion or in the return to a home town after many years and seeing it through new eyes (his wife's) - it's almost as if the events of the story could have taken place without the reunion but through chance encounters over the course of time in a small town or even in the greater Boston area at a series of events and moments. Otherwise, a pretty good story from one of our most consistently challenging and self-challenging writers.