Backstory

Description

Ansel Tone has been named "The Golden Boy of Popular History." He teaches propaganda at Columbia University and hawks a series of "Redux Revisionist History" best-sellers on late night talk shows. He trades on his good looks and family wealth to drive fast cars and run with glamorous women, though his personal life is poised between an overbearing father and a son he hardly knows.

Ansel attends a reunion of six friends who studied at Trinity College in Dublin, cloaked in four-hundred-years of student pranks and mayhem. He wants to see how twelve years has treated the ravishing Tess, his girlfriend that year who later married their classmate, Charlie. Charlie and Tess live in the spectacular "Mountain House" in the Hudson Valley. She's a big-firm lawyer. He's trying to replicate the success of his first novel and overcome the train-wreck of his second. At the reunion he announces he will fictionalize the story of how he won Tess away from Ansel at Trinity, changing the facts to improve the story, but first wants help remembering the facts.

Ansel panics that the new book will reveal incidents that could overturn his life and so sets out to manipulate the Trinity backstory. But complications ripple from Charlie digging into his college days, Ansel struggling to rewrite his past and Tess wondering if she wound up with the right guy, while the former classmates come to terms with themselves and each other and suffer the repercussions of rewriting history.