Professor Buzz “Buzzy” Lox, now in his sixties, is invited to the fifty year class reunion of his grammar school in Chicago, Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. The reunion will take place on January 12. As an erstwhile resident of the Chicago-area I can tell you that the middle of January is not the time that I would have picked for a reunion. But no matter – Buzzy wants to go and see the old gang. And he will bring with him Malinche – his beautiful, younger, third wife from Karachi.
Reunion had a very nostalgic feel to it. Buzzy had been through a lot since he left Chicago. In addition to the three wives, he’d lived in eight countries, speaks multiple languages, is the father of five children, and has multiple grandchildren. He knows he’s at the tail end of his life, and wondering if he made the right choices. Yes, his life was an adventure, but maybe he would have been better off marrying one of his classmates in Chicago and settling down there?
The book is fiction, but it is also undeniably autobiographical. The author, Hugh Fox, is Buzzy (more-or-less). Fox was dying of cancer when he wrote Reunion, and it was published just before he died. I found an interview of Fox online, and he describes the book this way:
How is REUNION different from your other novels?
I think that stylistically it’s more “classical comedy” + tragedy/life-overview, kind of like Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Dickens, the English novelists I was bathed in when I wrote REUNION. I used to read Huxley especially every day, immerse myself in British contemporary satire/confessionalism. I think it gets more to the heart of the matter (a vision of the shortness of life) more than any other novel I’ve ever written.
Fox was an interesting man. Among his many accomplishments, he wrote the first biography of Charles Bukowski, and was one of the creators of the Pushcart Prize for literature.
I enjoyed the book. The prose is frenetic, and stream of conscious. Some of the sentences were long, long, long, and packed with information. At times it was hard to take, but overall I think it worked.
Hugh Fox’s first posthumous novel, The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber, now out from Skylight Press. See http://www.skylightpress.co.uk – and http://skylightpress.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/the-dream-of-the-black-topaze-chamber-by-hugh-fox/