July 2020: Commencement (Sullivan)

Post date: Aug 06, 2020 4:11:36 AM

On Tuesday, July 7^th, fifteen of us gathered via Zoom to discuss J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel Commencement.

Commencement is a novel about four friends from Smith. Set in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, it covers their years at the college and their first five years after graduation. I suppose it would be appropriate to place the book in the “chick lit” genre, though I hesitate to do so. I am not sure the label has ever been considered a literary honorific, but perhaps that is changing. After all, there is a movement amongst some feminists to champion and reimagine the romance genre, and many of the leaders of this movement are Smith graduates. I know this because the Smith Alumnae Quarterly told me so, and because The Sophian has posted several interviews with prominent Smithie romance writers online (e.g. https://thesophian.com/never-judge-a-smithie-by-her-cover-sarah-maclean-on-the-romance-genre/).

Commencement is not a romance novel, though the characters’ romantic lives provide many of the plot’s key developments. Instead, it is a novel about female friendship and the tight bonds that form between young women who journey into to adulthood together. Although it contains plenty of drama and conflict, and some surprising moments of violence, one reviewer described it as “a beach book for smart women” and another as a “fun, fresh… and insightful read.” So perhaps, “chick lit” is the right label, and perhaps that isn’t so bad. We certainly turned to the book hoping for a break from the doom and gloom of some of our previous selections.

I suspect the book was a nice break, but not in the manner that we expected. In many ways, the book was a lot like the last four novels that we have read. For example, each new chapter brought a change in the narrative’s point of view, shifting back and forth from each of the four characters. Also like our previous four novels, Commencement had a central storyline concerning a traumatic series of events involving all of the main characters, but the novel also jumped back and forth in time a lot, showing us scenes from the characters’ years together at Smith and from their lives apart both before and after college.

For the most part, Sullivan successfully interwove these various threads. However, I think most of us found that she was not as masterful at the task as the other novelists we have read recently. Some said they could tell that this was Sullivan’s first work. One person said they “could see behind the curtain too much,” as if they could sense the author checking off boxes as she pieced her book together. Another person added that the character development had started off strongly, but that it had plateaued. As the book drew to its dramatic conclusion, some storylines seemed too heavy-handed, some too underdeveloped. We wondered what readers who did not have a link to Smith would have found compelling in the book. In the end, the work seemed promising, but unsatisfying, and our members who are fans of Sullivan’s work encouraged us to try some of her more recent work. I certainly found enough to like in Commencement to make that sound inviting.

These observations notwithstanding, I think most of us were glad that we chose the book. One of its key strengths was its depiction of the powerful and abiding friendships that arose between the four women, who just happened to find themselves housed next to each other in their first year in college (on the third floor of King House, to be precise). This triggered lots of memories of the life-long friendships that we had formed at Smith. We also eagerly absorbed all the details that Sullivan provided about Smith’s student culture and traditions (who knew that Convocation now involves so much nudity?). We enjoyed comparing the Smith that Sullivan described to the Smith of our experiences. So much has changed, yet so many of the essential things have remained. It is easy to feel isolated during this pandemic, and I felt that the joy of this shared nostalgia trip alone made Commencement well worth reading.

Speaking of nostalgia, a couple of our longterm members found the book oddly familiar as they started reading it. It turns out that the book club read it in 2010. Oh well, perhaps that’s only fitting for a novel that brought back so many memories of the past.