Jules’s bank account is commensurate with her success Jomo travels in the pointy end of the plane on rare gem-hunting expeditions tenured Eloise receives large advances for her self-help books (The Pursuit of Joy and Seeking Pleasure) her tech-head wife is the beneficiary of a trust fund. Though there are some concessions to diversity: Eloise is queer with a younger wife while Jomo is biracial all are materially rich or at least maintain secure positions on the socioeconomic ladder. They are the type of liberal do-gooders who, like Rowan, hotfooted it over to “build houses in Guatemala or teach English to new immigrants” as soon as final exams were over every other summer. The quintet presents a shiny exemplar of their prestigious education. Narratively, Life After Truth is safe and remarkably normcore considering Dovey’s previous flights of experimental fancy. Those are more unsettling, allegorical and fabulistic in timbre, or otherwise historical in ambit: Blood Kin is about three men who are prisoners of a dictator in an unnamed country Only the Animals consists of stories recounted by the “souls” of animals that have been the victims of human conflict In the Garden of the Fugitives views Pompeii from an anthropological perspective and South Africa post-apartheid. Spanning a few days up to and including the reunion weekend in 2018, this preppy play of modern manners in a contemporary setting is grounded with the scaffold of realism, unlike Dovey’s earlier fictional works. She’s a stay-at-home mum he’s a school principal. Jules, a famous actress Eloise, a professor of hedonics (the science of happiness and pleasure), and Mariam and Rowan, a married couple with two preschoolers. There’s Jomo, now the director of Gem Acquisitions, a purveyor of luxury jewellery. Dovey assembles them in middle-adult form, wearing the fancy accoutrements of their achievements.
The novel begins with the Harvard class of 2003 and an anniversary report of five of its alumni 15 years later. It was inspired by a passage in her youth when she was a scholarship student at Harvard and the subsequent emotional ructions following a reunion there years later. Life After Truth is a marked departure from these previous works in terms of tone, style and content. She moves easily between the parameters of the two forms. C eridwen Dovey has published to acclaim both fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives), and non-fiction (Writers on Writers: On JM Coetzee and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The Working Lives of Others).