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The Red Book is a fiction written by Deborah Copaken
Kogana, a Harvard graduate, married with three children, a writer and
a war photojournalist. The female characters in The Red Book are like that of the characters in Sex and the
City. Mia Mandelbaum Zane, Addison
Cornwall Hunt, Jane Nguyen Streeter
and Clover Pace Love were college roommates at Harvard University and
they graduated in 1989. They
return to their campus in
Cambridge for their 20th reunion. Every five years, the Harvard
Alumni Association puts out class reports of their former students in the
anniversary book known as “The Red
Book”. The hardbound crimson volumn contains the
entries by the Harvard alumni who write a few paragraphs summarizing their
lives during the past five years. There is always a story that we tell the
world and the real story about dashed dreams, loss and simply dreams we have to let go. The tradition of
submitting class reports dates back to the mid 1800s and they get published and
circulated within the Harvard fraternity. In a way, the exercise forces alumni
to sit down and take stock of their lives every five years and account for
themselves.
Mia is married
to Jonathan who is a film director making romantic comedies with all of those
wedding photos under the closing credits. Mia used to be a promising actress.
While she declares her supreme satisfaction with motherhood, she becomes angry when
she meets a less talented classmate who has become a major celebrity.
Kogana writes,
‘We are all stars of our
own movies, he tells his children,
but we are also its writer, creator, and narrator. ( “ Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Max
will interrupt , playfully, “and it’s our God-given duty to make it
interesting. Got it, Dad. Check on the life well spent. Now can we clear our
plates and have dessert?” ) Jonathan imagines the tracking shot of this scene,
the camera on a dolly following him down the road, the human figure kept
consistently center frame until the last possible moment, when the rig should
fly up on a jib for a more bird’s –eye view as the man slips out of the frame.’
In the story, to
the outside world, Jonathan has done extraordinarily well as a film director.
At age 61, he suddenly struggles
with meaning and what kind of mark he wants to leave on the world.
Addison is an artist
who hasn’t really created any art in years and she spends her years looking
after the three children she has with her writer husband who is trying to write
his second novel. Clover is recently married to a lawyer
husband and she is desperate for a
baby but her husband refuses to have a fertility test. Jane is a journalist living and working
in Paris and she is coming to terms with the death of her adoptive mother and
her husband.
Deborah
Copaken Kogan clickhere is observant about the
realities of life and as the novel spans over the three-day reunion, she is
good in connecting the past to the present. The Red Book is about friendship, dreams, infidelity, motherhood, sexuality and mortality. There is a lot going on
so much so that at some points, there is just too much going on. The novel is
an interesting read if you like a good saga.
In life, there
are always compromises to be made as we cannot have it all. The reality is even
a Harvard education can never prepare one for the real life that is about earning your keep, living well, navigating a marriage, parenting and surviving illnesses and failed
ventures.The Red Book shows that very
few graduates live up to their potentials even if they go to Harvard. It is
also about how we all sacrifice our true selves for the sake of a life that we
think we should have in the hope that we can finally find harmony and balance
between what we really want to do with our life and who we have become.
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