'Don't You Forget About Me' by Jancee Dunn
BOOK REVIEW
A debut novel about a high school reunion deftly avoids clichés.
CONSIDERING she spent more than a decade interviewing celebrities for Rolling Stone -- an experience she recounted in her 2006 memoir "But Enough About Me" -- it would have been easy for Jancee Dunn to use the trappings of fame as background for her debut novel, or to write a roman à clef about debauched rockers. Happily, she shunned that crowded playing field; she did, however, pick an even more banal one, that of the high school reunion tale. Even worse: the '80s-flavored reunion. And yet Dunn's deft sense of pacing and her old-fashioned niceness make "Don't You Forget About Me" a breezy, entertaining summer read that never insults the reader's intelligence. This is a seemingly modest achievement that should not be underestimated.
The book's most compelling aspect is that its humor, largely observational, is always affectionate. "Don't You Forget About Me" doesn't try to compensate for the familiarity of its chosen subgenre with arch hipness, and it eschews the veneer of weary cynicism that coats so many books like green fuzz on a month-old piece of cheese. Dunn laughed at herself in her memoir; in the novel it's her heroine and possible stand-in, the gently hapless Lillian Curtis, who bears the brunt of the jokes while never turning into a pathetic doormat.
At 38, Lillian is a happy Manhattanite, shuttling between her "human golden retriever" of a husband, Adam, and her job as producer on the talk show "Tell Me Everything! With Vi Barbour," a haven for semi-washed-up celebrities. After Adam abruptly dumps her, Lillian decides to regroup at her childhood home in New Jersey. She even stays in her old bedroom, perfectly preserved by her parents as if it were the 1980s wing of the Smithsonian. Because she has, let's face it, nothing better to do, Lillian decides to attend her 20-year high school reunion. She'll reconnect with the old gang from the Bethel Memorial High class of 1988 and who knows, her then-boyfriend, the charismatic, unpredictable Christian, might even show up.
Like the quaint show she works on, Lillian is slightly eccentric and rather happy being out of touch with the zeitgeist. Her idea of a fun weekend is eating tuna casserole and watching "Singin' in the Rain" at the Connecticut house of her 74-year-old boss and friend Vi. "I just had no interest in contemporary pop culture," Lillian muses without any discernible regret. This sets up a clever way to defuse the book's blah premise, since Dunn suggests that immersing her protagonist in a warm bath of '80s nostalgia actually is a step forward for Lillian.
