(courtesy stevenrowley.com)
Knowing we are loved is a powerful thing.
If we are fortunate enough to have emotionally expressive people in our life, we will know that, deeply and often; but, and all too often this is the case, either through benign neglect or lack of care (usually the former than the latter), we go through knowing people like or love us but never being explicitly told that or why it is that we mean so much to them.
Following a traumatic incident close to the end of their end of their collective time at college where they have knitted themselves into a group so tight its more like family than anything else, Jordan Vargas and his friends Jordy (also his romantic partner), Naomi, Craig, and Marielle, the five characters at the heart of Steven Rowley’s (The Guncle) The Celebrants decide that they will tell each other why it is they love having the others around and the profound difference they make to their lives.
The idea of this wonderful affirmation of closely-forged bonds, which initially waver and fade as you might expect following the loss of physical proximity that college afforded them, is an inspirational one, borne of a youthful exuberance and the potent aftermath of grief where they deal with the impotence of being unable someone who’s no longer around that they love them, and why, by deciding to consciously do this whenever they can.
Jordan stared at his phone. Not believing in something and not needing something were two different things. He didn’t know how to explain it yet, and frankly maybe he never would, but everything from here until the end would be different. All bets were off. That was just the way it was. ‘Do you remember how it started?’
‘The pact?’
And this time Jordan couldn’t help himself, because he always smiled when his husband said I do.
This passionate declaration, which also lessens in its emotional intensity as the years go by, will take the form, it is decided, of living funerals, the incidence of which will be invoked by whichever member of the group feels they need a shot in the arm.
For years nothing is said, and with the group spread across the United States, it looks like the living funerals will be all youthful good intention with no middle-age execution to speak of; but then Marielle, emotionally awash in the wake of a marriage break-up, Naomi, chaotically grief-stricken after her parents die in the same accident, summon everyone and Craig, caught up in a criminal matter for which he’s the fall guy, ask for their living funeral to take place and the long dormant pact comes alive.
At first, and honestly in all three instances, all the members of this once-tight but now a little frayed and separated found family, are awkward and reluctant to spill their hearts to each other.
It’s not that they don’t matter to each other anymore; they are family and always will be, but like most families, closeness waxes and wanes and in the down period, which is most of their post-college adult life, they’re no longer as sure about what it is they share and why it mattered so much.
But as they begin to open themselves up, and this is not a linear process ebbing and flowing depending on where people are in their lives, it becomes clear the bonds of youth have endured, even if they now take a different, initially unfamiliar form.
(courtesy stevenrowley.com)
Full of brutal honesty and the brokenness of adult life, but also some real wit and heartfelt emotionalism, The Celebrants is a potently moving and thoughtful celebration of what friendships of the deepest kind mean to us as we grow older and have to grapple with the fact that life isn’t going to be as kind as we hoped nor as vivaciously hopeful and fulfilling as we envisioned.
To an extent, the group, dealing with searingly intense and soul-crushingly immense grief at a very young age, know this but it’s only as they enter their thirties, forties and the fifties beckon, that these college students of the 1990s begin to fully appreciate how much life can let us down.
The fallibility of thinking we are invincible sits at the very centre of The Celebrants, which radiates a powerful liberating honesty about how life can go terribly wrong but why friendships of the closest kind matter so much.
It’s revelatory reading as the group grapple with these three living funerals and how it forces them to go back and work out why these people matter so much, and it becomes even more so when Jordan invokes his turn but with a secret that is going to seismically change the nature of their group and how their loved and hated in equal measures pact will operate.
Craig’s eyes welled with tears. They were connected in such meaningful ways, all of them, and had been since the night they first met. he was so much more than the kid his parents couldn’t be bothered with, pawned off on distant family to raise … He was the beating heart of a family, this family, a family of friends, and they continued to give him so much. All this time he had thought of their association as it related to death, when in fact the bond he had with these friends had everything to do with life.
What makes The Celebrants such a richly rewarding book to read is that Rowley almost magically manages to be immensely and intensely moving in the way he talks about these friends and how they live out and react to their pact, and what dredges from the depths of them all, but also leavens the story with a humour borne of five friends who speak with the casual intimacy (and yes, the capacity for wounding) that oils the wheels of long-standing friendship groups.
This beautiful, arrestingly affecting tension between the darkness and bleakness of life and its capacity for joy-filled, if imperfectly-realised connection sustains The Celebrants through some intimately intense narrative shifts and turns.
Much like The Guncle, which was lighthearted in its execution while being grittily honest in its narrative intent, The Celebrants knows that life is a mix of both and that we all swing, in one way or another between the lightness of seeing friends and catching up and the way in which they can get, often uncomfortably, right to the heart of us, and both damage us, and build us up.
Balancing idealistic hope and rich friendship with anger, disappointment and prickly tension, The Celebrants is as real a look at the travails and challenges of growing older as you’re ever likely to find, full to the marvellously enrapturing brim with truth and honest, buoyant humour and searing sadness, of it a reflection of life in all its forms, with every moment, bumps in the road aside, and they’re a plenty, made all the better by having friends who are family and who, and this is critically important, know how much they mean to each other and live it out in ways you will immensely moving and will not quickly forget.