The Celebrants (2023) is Steven Rowley’s fourth novel, which explores the power of long-term friendship in the face of life’s catastrophic events and the realities of mortality. A New York Times bestseller, the novel was also a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Pick. The novel takes place primarily in Big Sur, California, and centers on five friends—Jordan, Jordy, Marielle, Naomi, and Craig—who graduated from Berkeley in 1995. While they grow apart in some ways, they meet periodically to hold living funerals for each other to ensure that they leave nothing left unsaid, honoring the pact they made after their roommate, Alec, died of a drug overdose. Attempts (both uncanny and banal) to commune with or remember Alec are prevalent throughout the text. The ensemble cast and focus on dialogue both draw on Rowley’s earlier career as a screenwriter. As one of the novel’s protagonists, Jordan, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the friends confront mortality in several different forms, and Rowley introduces The Role of Dark Humor in Coping with Mortality and Funerals Are for the Living as significant themes in the work. The novel is characterized as realistic, literary fiction, and has been compared to The Big Chill, the 1983 comedy drama film in which a group of University of Michigan alumni gather when their friend, Alex, dies by suicide.

The narrative is nonlinear, beginning in 2023 with the group gathering for the final funeral in light of Jordan’s terminal illness. The last funeral is for Jordy, Jordan’s husband, although this isn’t clear to the reader until the concluding section. The novel is divided into six discrete parts. After the group convenes in 2023, the narrative shifts to 1995 with Alec’s funeral and the formation of the pact, then Marielle’s funeral in 2013, Naomi’s in 2016, and Craig’s in 2018; it then returns to Jordy’s in 2023. Each section is interspersed with an interlude titled “The Jordans” in which the narrative returns to the events leading up to Jordy’s 2023 funeral, with Jordan and Jordy trying to navigate Jordan’s terminal cancer diagnosis. The time that elapses between gatherings emphasizes the theme of The Closeness of Found Family Despite Periods of Distance.

Rowley employs third-person limited perspective, which shifts with each section—as well as at key moments within the narrative—depending on which character is the point of focus. Each of the friends function as a protagonist and undergoes a significant journey as a character. The living funeral event functions as a catalyst for the character who is the object of the ritual, and each transformation focuses on a reinvention or reclamation of identity. Rowley therefore explores the extent to which identity is derived from the self or one’s relationships, making Identity Originating in Self Versus Others a key theme.

This guide refers to the 2023 US Putnam edition.

Content Warning: This study guide includes discussions of drug overdose, suicide, terminal illness, and nonconsensual sex.

Plot Summary

Not having seen each other in five years, a group of five close friends—Jordan Vargas, Jordan Tosic (Jordy), Naomi Ito, Craig Scheffler, and Marielle Holland—convene in Naomi’s late parents’ house in Big Sur, California. Having been roommates as transfer students to Berkeley, the group formed a pact to hold living funerals for each other after their roommate, Alec, died by drug overdose two weeks before their 1995 graduation. Whether the death was accidental or a result of suicide is never made certain, but it is later revealed that Alec had been diagnosed with AIDS soon before his death. The group members harbor guilt over the idea that they may have been able to intervene in a meaningful way with Alec by expressing the difference he had made in their lives. As the group gather in the Big Sur house, named Sur la Vie, they argue playfully and make fun of each other as they order dinner. It becomes clear that Jordan is keeping a secret about the reason they have gathered, which is that he has received a terminal cancer diagnosis.

In 1995, the group convenes in Big Sur after Alec’s funeral and decides to form their pact. Jordy and Jordan have recently started sleeping together and spend time alone together, and Craig and Marielle have sex. The narrator clarifies that Marielle is not in a psychological state to give her consent, in part because she and Alec had been in a romantic relationship. The event results in the conception of Marielle’s daughter, Mia. In the next section, the narrative moves to 2013 and Marielle’s funeral, which she triggers in the wake of her divorce from her husband, Max, soon before Mia leaves for college. When funeral plans stall, the group members attempt to contact Alec via Ouija board and have an unsettling experience, but Marielle’s funeral eventually proves successful and she feels able to reclaim her identity. She moves to Oregon and begins work in an animal rescue after the funeral proceedings.

The group next meets in 2016 after Naomi’s parents die in a plane crash. Unable to face their house, the group decides on a destination funeral in Puerto Vallarta. The key event of Naomi’s funeral is an ill-fated skydiving trip, in which she talks her way into piloting the plane; she then has a mental health crisis and is eventually the only one of the friends who doesn’t jump. Jordan has a harrowing experience when his parachute doesn’t open and his jump partner needs to deploy the reserve, but he suggests afterward that he learned a valuable lesson about lack of control. Naomi decides to give her own eulogy and says goodbye both to her parents and the version of herself who was never enough for them.

The group meets again in 2018 when Craig pleads guilty to art fraud, a crime for which he soon after serves seven months in prison. Having been surprised when Marielle triggered the pact on his behalf, Craig is disappointed that his funeral is taking place at his home in New York and attempts to halt proceedings by causing Jordy to reveal a long-kept secret. Jordy reveals that he knew that Alec had been diagnosed with AIDS, and Marielle is furious with him. She leaves and coincidentally meets her daughter, Mia, on the street. The funeral weekend eventually continues—with Mia in tow—when Craig triggers the pact on his own behalf. They visit the Met Cloisters museum together, after which Marielle tells Craig that Mia is his daughter (a fact she only admits to herself upon seeing them together). The group, excepting Naomi who has been sober since soon after her own funeral, takes mushrooms and goes on a boat tour around Manhattan, where Craig scatters ashes of an old painting of his to make way for his new artistic talent and identity.

The narrative returns to 2023, and Jordan announces that he has triggered the pact on behalf of his husband and has entered Jordy in a swim race: Escape from Alcatraz. The group attends the event, which is a significant reclamation of identity for Jordy, then holds the funeral that functions as a funeral for both Jordans. The novel concludes with Jordan’s obituary.