matters further is Lurie’s distinctly feminist view of marriage, children, and men. Her suburban, intelligent, middle-aged housewives have been left for younger women, have fallen victim to graying hair and sagging breasts, have been uprooted from friends and comfortable surroundings to follow their husbands’ careers, or have witnessed their children grow from cherubic babyhood to monstrous adolescence. They have made their choices, chosen their men and their lives long ago (when they were inexperienced), and now that they have knowledge of themselves and their world, they have no choices to make. Their husbands are sexually bored, professionally frustrated, and emotionally restless. Such marriages as these stay together for the sake of what Lurie calls The Children.

Typical of such children are the Tates’ two teenagers, Jeffrey and Matilda, once known as “Jeffo” and “Muffy.” Now growing into adulthood, they have become rude, abusive, profane, lazy, and selfish. They fight constantly, and both Erica and Brian Tate have come to despise them; to Erica, they are aliens who have taken over the bodies of the children she once loved. Lurie continually undermines the romantic notions of marriage and family that keep women from becoming fully developed, independent human beings. Women who spend their lives raising children, she insists, might find those children growing into hateful monsters. Wives who devote their lives to the careers of their husbands might be left with no lives of their own if the husband leaves them for another woman, and women without men are subjected to the mindless stereotypes of society. Divorced women who take lovers, such as Danielle Zimmern of The War Between the Tates, are categorized as sluts by society, while professional women who do not marry, such as Vinnie Miner of Foreign Affairs, are thought to be sexless spinsters.

Vinnie, in fact, is a good example of the realistic way that Lurie portrays women. A woman in her fifties who is not pretty by traditional American standards, Vinnie is juxtaposed to her English department colleague Fred Turner, a Hollywood-handsome young man. In London to do academic research, both have “foreign affairs,” Vinnie with a somewhat loutish American tourist, Chuck Mumpson, and Turner with a famous British beauty and television actress, Lady Rosemary Radley. That Vinnie should have any affair whatsoever may seem surprising, for, as Lurie points out, society does not seem to expect physically unattractive women over fifty to have any sex life at all. Vinnie, however, though far from promiscuous, has been sexually active all her life, usually with male friends she has known for a long time. Sex, as she ponders at one point, has never been hard to attain, though love has been. (Sex, in fact, is not hard for any woman to attain, she concludes, if she sets her sights low enough.) Ironically, oafish Chuck Mumpson turns out to be a tender and sensitive lover, while the dazzlingly beautiful Rosemary is revealed as shallow, vain, incapable of love, and inwardly ugly. The beautiful and the handsome, like Fred and Rosemary, have just as much difficulty finding genuine love and affection as, by society’s standards, the unattractive and no longer youthful.

Another favorite target of Lurie’s satire is class, not only in the United States but, in Foreign Affairs, in England as well. Her upper-middle-class American academics range from uptight, conservative boors such as Don Dibble, who gets trapped in his office by a group of radical feminists in The War Between the Tates, to aspiring young professors such as Fred Turner, whose theatrical good looks make him suspect to his more conventional-looking male colleagues. Lurie’s academics are pigeonholed in their sequestered world not only by whom they are sleeping with but also by how well they keep it hidden, by meaningless books and articles (and how well they are received by reviewers), and by the whimsical regard or disregard of their more powerful colleagues.

Lurie has a wonderful eye for details of clothing, material possessions, and surroundings that typify middle-class American life. Her biting satire of Southern California, The Nowhere City, ridicules the tacky architecture, labyrinthine freeways, twenty-four-hour “Joy Superdupermarkets,” littered and smelly beaches, and voracious realty development that only a confirmed easterner such as Lurie could describe with such gleeful malice. To Lurie, Los Angeles is a “nowhere” city: a stratified geographical area with a central valley thick with smog and poverty, topped by the private pools and hillside palaces of the tastelessly rich.

Finally, there is the subclass of hippies, gurus, student groupies, and dropouts that appears frequently in Lurie’s novels, not so much representing a class as a counterculture of the young and disenfranchised. Like Wendy Gahaghan and Ceci O’Connor, they live in “the now”—with no emotional commitment, no sense of responsibility, no ambition, and no hope. Small wonder that Wendy, at the end of The War Between the Tates, plans to go off with her latest casual lover to California, Lurie’s favorite nowhere.

In Imaginary Friends, Lurie satirizes American religion, another favorite subject of traditional satirists. Reminiscent of both Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927) and Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886, a satire not on religion but on the feminist movement of his day), the novel explores a spiritualist group called the Truth Seekers, a group of lower-middle-class losers who are convinced they are in touch with a spiritual space traveler named Ro of Varna, who sends messages (via automatic writing) through a young woman in the group named Verena Roberts.

The Seekers could be one of any number of similar groups throughout the United States, trying to find spiritual uplift for their pathetic and uneventful lives. The group is infiltrated by two sociologists from Corinth University who are out to prove a hypothesis about belief systems and find in the Seekers a perfect control group. As it turns out, the senior sociologist, Thomas McMann, is more lunatic than any of the Seekers (the novel also lampoons social scientists) and winds up in an asylum, believing that he himself is Ro of Varna. Both seekers and sociologists, Lurie tells us, get caught up in their own delusionary systems, irrational wishes, and distorted perceptions of reality—perhaps everyone does at one time or another—and who is to say that one form of delusion is better or worse than another?

Aside from the intelligence, social commentary, and sheer fun of Lurie’s novels, many admire them simply for their artistry. Her carefully constructed novels often employ several voices and points of view, effortless shifts from present to past time, believable dialogue, and arresting images. Her prose is admirably lucid, concise, and direct, always perfectly suited to the narrative and subject. Her wit and use of irony are those of a highly sophisticated social novelist, and her illumination of the self-deceptions and disappointments of adult life reveal a novelist of serious intent for mature readers.

The Nowhere City

First published: 1965

Type of work: Novel

A young history professor and his wife encounter culture shock in Southern California.

The Nowhere City, Lurie’s second published novel, is a somewhat malicious satire on California manners and customs, written from the point of view of someone who believes in the superiority of life in the eastern United States. In this early work, some of Lurie’s dominant themes become evident: marital disharmony, the transformational effect of adultery, and the shabbiness of American middle-class culture.

The central characters are Paul and Katherine Cattleman, a young historian and his wife who have come to California from Harvard University, where Paul was completing work on his doctorate. Paul has taken a job with The Nutting Research Development Corporation, a large electronic firm in Los Angeles; his assignment is to write a history and description of the company’s operations. To Paul, it is an ideal position: He will have time to write his dissertation and will be making twice the salary he would make as a young college instructor. Besides, he thinks of Los Angeles as an exciting and vital American frontier—the city of the future.

To his wife, Katherine, however, Los Angeles is a nightmare. The smog irritates her sinuses, the people look weird and freakish, the weather is hot and uncomfortable, and the city seems plastic and unreal. She is even attacked by a buffalo while visiting a zoo. Katherine’s Los Angeles is a cheap, shoddy city of commercial exploitation, with desperate people seeking success, love, some hero to worship, or some beauty to ogle.

A subplot involves Hollywood starlet Glory Green and her husband, Dr. Isadore Einsam, a successful Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Lurie often casts dissimilar characters into her novels, comparing and contrasting their lives and bringing them into unexpected relations with each other. In this novel, Katherine takes a job as a research assistant at UCLA, working for Einsam, and later, through Einsam, she becomes secretary to Glory Green. Paul, who has been having an affair with Ceci O’Connor, a coffee-shop waitress and California hippie, meets Glory when he goes to her Beverly Hills mansion to pick up his wife.

Typical of Lurie’s novels, too, the couples become sexually involved with each other. Katherine has an affair with “Iz” Einsam, while Paul has one with Glory. These brief encounters go nowhere and each partner goes back to the original spouse. Intellectual Iz goes back to Glory, the stereotypical dumb blonde, while neurotic Katherine returns to Paul, whose desire to be a California swinger is tempered by eastern common sense and propriety. At the end of the novel, he accepts a teaching job at Convers College, north of Boston, and flies off to what presumably will be a more responsible and satisfactory life.

Lurie’s main thrust in this novel is to lampoon Southern California manners, morals, and lifestyles. Paul, when he takes up with Ceci, becomes a ridiculous figure—a mature, well-educated man who dresses in paint-splattered chino pants, sweatshirt, and sandals, grows a beard, and hangs around espresso bars with Ceci. He even prides himself on getting busted by the police during a coffeehouse sweep for drug violators. Katherine, who hates Californians for their indifference and irresponsibility, goes Californian herself at the end of the novel, transforming from a neurotic, self-conscious, and somewhat plain young woman into a tanned, sexually flirtatious, and flashily dressed “Los Angeles type” who is indifferent to any responsibilities she might have as a wife. When Paul returns East, she remains behind.

Lurie has further fun with California freeways, buildings (homes shaped like pagodas, grocery stores like Turkish baths, and restaurants like boats), art (vulgarly sensual nudes), self-indulgence(a billboard advertising coffee proclaims in huge red letters “Indulge Yourself”), and the state’s seeming obsession with speed and the present, its apparent rejection of reason and the past. Children have names like Psyche, Astarte, and Freya, and Hollywood beauties such as Glory Green are beautiful only at a distance, for up close, as Paul notices, she is vulgar, freckled, and commonplace. Nothing in the Nowhere City is what it seems: Dashing Hollywood he-man Rory Gunn is gay, the Nutting Corporation (the name is suggestive) cares nothing for history and is even afraid that Paul Cattleman will find out some of the unsavory truth about its past. To Lurie, Californians seem subject to what she calls Watson’s Law (named after a Boston mathematician), which states that the purpose of the economy is to expend as much time, money, and energy as possible without creating anything useful. That, in fact, seems precisely what has taken place in The Nowhere City. The activity of the characters has produced exactly nothing, and at the conclusion of the novel, they are right back where they started.

Imaginary Friends

First published: 1967

Type of work: Novel

Two sociologists join a religious-spiritualist group called the Truth Seekers in order to write a sociological study of belief systems.

Imaginary Friends is unlike Lurie’s other novels in that marriage, adultery, and the continuing war between the sexes, Lurie’s most common themes, give way to other concerns. She does, however, continue to explore academic lives—in this case, an older sociology professor, Thomas McMann, and his younger colleague, Roger Zimmern—and she once again juxtaposes two kinds of culture; the simple, lower-middle-class Truth Seekers with the intellectual, well-bred, and sophisticated sociologists who come to study them. Lurie demonstrates that the rational beliefs and pretensions of intellectuals are often more monstrous than the seemingly lunatic beliefs of the uneducated and that the most revered institutions of American life—colleges and churches, for example—are no more preferable to mystical cults and religious fringe groups, and often have fewer answers.

Lurie’s interest in such things as spiritualism and automatic writing may have come from her friendship with poet James Merrill, whose long narrative poem The Book of Ephraim (1977) recounts twenty years of experience with seances and Ouija boards. The novel is, in fact, dedicated to Merrill and another Ouija board enthusiast, David Jackson. Like them, Lurie takes the supernatural seriously. Verena Roberts, a young Seeker through whom higher beings speak by way of automatic writing, often gives messages that are difficult to explain rationally, although McMann, the senior sociologist, is always ready with a glib explanation.

At one point, for example, Zimmem (through Verena) receives a message from MAKES FAVOUR, SEE RIGHT ILLS, and O MAKE A VEIL HIGH, obvious puns on classic sociologists Max Weber, C. Wright Mills, and Nicolo Machiavelli, about whom Zimmern was thinking at the time. Moreover, Verena seems to have extrasensory perception when it comes to such things as finding lost car keys: Zimmern’s, she tells him correctly, had slipped down behind some furniture and were lying next to the wall. To Lurie, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in sociology.

A more literary influence on Imaginary Friends is Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. In James’s novel, principally concerned with the American women’s movement of the late nineteenth century, Verena Tarrant is a young, charismatic public speaker who is an inspirational apostle of the feminist cause. In Lurie’s novel, Verena Roberts is a similar inspirational apostle for the Truth Seekers. Both are objects of adoration by young men who wish them to renounce their passionate beliefs: Verena Tarrant is pursued by Basil Ransom, who, by muscular force, carries her off with him at the end; Verena Roberts, having been pursued by a tall, gawky boy named Ken (and worshiped from afar by narrator Roger Zimmern), finally gives up her beliefs, marries Ken, and goes off to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Both novels are about contemporary social movements (feminism in James’s time, religious fundamentalism in Lurie’s), and both novels contain conflicts between the natural, instinctive, naïve gifts of an idealistic young woman and the educated, neurotic, and insensitive demands of others who want her for personal gratification.

As Lurie’s novel progresses, the story’s narrator, Roger Zimmern, becomes aware of the increasing duplicity, neurotic behavior, and peculiarity of his senior colleague, Thomas McMann. Having gone to the home of the Seekers in Sophis (another suggestive name) to prove an academic theory that opposition and doubt unite rather than weaken a group such as the Seekers, McMann manipulates data to make the hypothesis come true. The Seekers have been in contact, by way of Verena’s automatic writing, with a spiritual alien named Ro of Varna, and when Ro promises to appear physically at a certain date, McMann and Zimmern have an ideal test situation. What will happen to the group when Ro fails to materialize, as will surely be the outcome?

On the evening of his promised appearance (which, of course, does fail to happen), Ro sends a final message: “I am in Man on earth.” This is interpreted by some of the Seekers to mean that Ro has become incarnate within McMann here on earth—an interpretation that McMann does not try to deny or dispel. Further, McMann assumes deific powers within the group when he takes it upon himself to “protect” Verena against the attempts of Ken to contact her, and, finally, when he chases Ken off the premises with a gun. The result is that Zimmern comes to realize that his colleague is mad, and McMann ends up in a mental asylum, believing he is Ro of Varna.

Lurie’s novel ultimately asks the reader to consider some very serious questions. Who is more self-deluded, those who believe in flying saucer saviors from the planet Varna or those who spend fruitless lifetimes studying them? Which of them live in the “real” world, those who believe that Varnians will deliver them the truth or those who believe the same from the high-level abstractions of the social sciences? Who do more harm, the Seekers with their weekly meetings of hymn singing, automatic writing, and nonsense about astral projection or McMann and Zimmern with their biased conclusions, their egomaniacal self-importance, their willingness to use others, and their questionable perception of reality? Lurie clearly comes down on the side of the Seekers. Ultimately, she forces one to question the ideals and attributes considered sacrosanct in American life—education, religion, science, society, and truth.

The War Between the Tates

First published: 1974

Type of work: Novel

The marriage of Erica and Brian Tate is a war between the sexes, not unlike actual battle with its victories, defeats, and victims.

The War Between the Tates, Lurie’s best-known novel, is a wickedly humorous satire on marriage, infidelity, and American society. Lurie sets her narrative during the time of the Vietnam War, and early in the novel she develops an extended comparison between that disastrous American conflict and the typically American Tate marriage.

Brian and Erica Tate, like the South Vietnamese, find that their territory (an upper-middle-class house on Jones Creek Road, near Corinth University) is being taken over. The Tates liken their teenage children, Jeffrey and Matilda, to North Vietnamese invaders. Like America’s involvement in Vietnam, the conflict between the Tates and their children began in a way analogous to a police action and has steadily escalated into all-out deadly warfare. From the children’s point of view, their parents are the American invaders—superior in experience and resources but deeply hypocritical. While the children want only independence and self-government, the parents refuse to negotiate, so the children retreat into the jungles of their upstairs rooms, coming out only briefly for guerrilla skirmishes.

Brian and Erica, on the other hand, regard themselves as democratic and freedom-loving people; never having officially declared themselves at war, they see their mission as a peace-keeping and advisory effort. Although they have won most of the brief, pitched battles, however, the parents know that in the long run they will never win the war. The separation of powers by which they have operated their marriage—Erica as the executive branch and Brian as the legislative and judicial—has utterly failed to suppress colonial revolt. The Tates’ victories are now all negative ones; the best they can hope for is to contain the enemy within the existing combat zone.

Lurie’s witty metaphor is carried throughout the novel (perhaps too much so, as some have criticized). Brian and Erica’s separation is like the division in America itself. Erica, tired of her selfish, rude, and rebellious children, has given up the fight, while Brian finds her desertion disheartening and disloyal. Just as there was student unrest in the colleges during the early 1970’s, so is there unrest at Corinth, where Brian teaches political science. Radical feminists, taking Brian’s advice, protest the sexist remarks of Brian’s department antagonist Don Dibble, and when things get out of hand, they invade Dibble’s office. Attempting to help, Brian himself is taken hostage, becoming a prisoner of war.

The novel concludes with a protest march on the Corinth campus, attended by most of the characters as well as an assortment of Maoists, gay activists, feminists, students, and local citizens. While the reader does not witness it, Lurie states that the group will eventually encounter violence at a bar called the Old Bavaria. This war has its victims, daily combats, withdrawals and retreats, and in the long run no one really wins.

The war that this novel is primarily about, however, is the war between the sexes. Brian, bored with Erica and suburban life, drifts into an affair with Wendy Gahaghan, a young graduate student in social psychology, while Erica, hurt by her husband’s affair, attempts an affair of her own with Sandy Finkelstein, an old school friend who now goes by the name of Zed and manages a local metaphysical bookstore. Brian finds himself a victim of the generation gap; he disapproves of Wendy’s use of marijuana, while she disapproves of his drinking alcohol. Her friends seem immature and shallow; Brian seems hopelessly uptight and square. When Wendy becomes pregnant with (possibly) Brian’s baby, Brian urges abortion, while Wendy wants a love child.

Erica, on the other hand, with a newly found freedom, finds herself a prisoner of sex. Finkelstein-Zed seems an intelligent, gentle, sensitive man (although an incredibly unattractive one), and she decides to give herself to him. Zed, however, proves impotent, and the affair is fruitless. Erica’s friend Danielle Zimmern (who is divorced from Leonard Zimmern, brother of the Roger Zimmern who narrates Imaginary Friends) is an example of what Erica would have to look forward to after divorce. Having slept unhappily with various men, Danielle passively winds up with Dr. Bernie Kotelchuk, a loutish veterinarian who, after raping her, convinces her to marry him. In the war between the sexes, both Brian and Erica are defeated, and at the end of the novel they march together against the Vietnam War, imagining reconciliation. Yet, just as the Southeast Asia conflict divided the United States long after the war’s end, so does the Tates’ truce suggest that unity will be a long time coming.

The War Between the Tates is Lurie’s writing at its best. The novel is carefully crafted, with the controlling metaphor of the war keeping the material well focused. Her main characters are sympathetic and genuine, and the details of the narrative capture with great accuracy the rebellious period of the early 1970’s, a period of midlife crisis for the nation as well as for the Tates. The conflict between generations, between radical passions and conventional morality, between those who experimented with sex, drugs, and Eastern philosophy and those who believed in all the traditional American ideals and institutions—these are captured with irony and wit and with an admirable detachment that avoids moralizing and sermons.

Foreign Affairs

First published: 1984

Type of work: Novel

Two Corinth University professors travel to London, where they are confronted by experiences that alter their perceptions and values.

Foreign Affairs won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Lurie juxtaposes American characters with British ones in order to explore national traits of both. “It’s a complex fate to be an American,” Henry James once said, and the complex fates of Lurie’s two American academics in this novel are a good example.

In the opening chapter, Virginia “Vinnie” Miner, a small, plain, unmarried, fifty-four-year-old Corinth professor of children’s literature, is traveling by plane to London, where she intends to do research on folk rhymes of schoolchildren. Feeling alone and having just read a bad review of her latest book, she visualizes herself traveling with an invisible dog named Fido, an imaginary manifestation of her self-pity. The worse she feels, the more Fido whines for attention, until he finally scrambles into her lap and goes to sleep. Seated next to her is American tourist Charles (Chuck) Mumpson, an engineer from Tulsa specializing in waste-disposal systems. Vinnie suffers his amiable conversation during the trip.

In the second chapter, the reader meets Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner, a strikingly handsome young man who is in London to do research on the eighteenth century poet and playwright John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Turner, too, is lonely, having just separated from his wife, Ruth, and knowing no one in London except some graduate school friends and Vinnie, with whom he has had little contact at Corinth. Ripe for female companionship, if not an affair, Turner takes up with Lady Rosemary Radley, a beautiful British television actress whom he meets at a party. Equally lonely, Vinnie goes out with Mumpson, the waste-disposal specialist.

For the remainder of the novel, Lurie alternates chapters involving Vinnie and Turner, juxtaposing each one’s British “affair” with the other’s. Neither turns out happily. Mumpson, who seems to Vinnie’s British friends like a comic American stereotype of the blustering tourist, dies of a heart attack while scouring the English countryside for traces of Mumpson family roots. Vinnie comes to realize, however, that he truly loved her and was an admirable human being. It was her blind Anglophilia, her tendency to become more snobbish and timid than the worst of the British, that prevented her from loving him completely. Vinnie, who has often had sex but never love, goes back home to Corinth knowing that at least once in her life, someone has loved her.

Turner is less fortunate. Gay, vivacious Rosemary turns out to be lecherous, ugly Mrs. Harris, a drunken, filthy cockney charwoman she dresses up as and pretends to be when she wants to keep Fred and others at a distance. An actress who has specialized in the role of an upper-class beauty, Rosemary plays that role in her public daily life, though her real self, the Mrs. Harris side, comes out when she is alone. More accurately, Rosemary does not seem to know who she is, Lady Radley or Mrs. Harris, and she consequently has lost touch with reality. Like many things in London, the Americans conclude, she is sophisticated and alluring on the surface but ugly and commonplace beneath.

In some ways, Foreign Affairs is like the fairy tales that Vinnie Miner (and Lurie) teach and love. Vinnie, the ugly princess, is turned into a beloved beauty by Prince Charming Mumpson, while Fred Turner, the handsome prince, falls in love with Rosemary, whose outward beauty hides the wicked witch within. Like those tales, fact and fancy intermingle (Vinnie’s invisible dog, Fido, for example), to raise troubling questions about illusion and reality. Contrary to the way things seem, the novel insists, true love, true goodness, and true beauty and ugliness exist, almost magically, beneath the surface of things.