[In the following review, Holleran contends that Familiar Spirits is a revealing and honest recounting of Lurie's friendship with David Jackson and James Merrill.]

Most of us want the marriages of our friends to be perfect. This, of course, includes gay couples. We like to visit the happy pair, soak up their hospitality, use them as a point of stability in our lives. Yet we can never know the backstage scenes and bargains, the real dynamic behind the facade that married couples, especially when they happen to be our hosts, construct to charm us; and that is, among other things, the subject of Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson that recounts her friendship over several decades with the poet, who died in 1995, and his partner David Jackson, who still lives in Key West.

Investigating marriage is something that Lurie has done before in novels like The War between the Tates. The partnership of Jackson and Merrill was by no means a war—it seems to have been particularly civilized—and yet, like all marriages, especially one between two writers with two very different careers, it had its issues. By the time we reach Chapter 10 (“Trouble”) and read the lines “When did it all begin to go bad, slowly at first and then faster and faster?” we hear, if not a smacking of the lips, then a certain inevitable rue that is at the heart of almost all post-mortems of a marriage. Lurie's memoir is not quite a pathobiography (Joyce Carol Oates' coinage for books that prove how miserable successful, famous people really were), “Disturbing”—a judicious, restrained, polite word—is the adjective most often used in this account. Yet there is something unblinking and remorseless about Lurie's assay of this couple and her attempt to rescue Jackson from the artistic oblivion which “bad luck, not lack of talent, ambition or effort, was responsible for …” Like those who felt Zelda Fitzgerald was short-shrifted by Scott in terms of literary fame, Lurie lays her case for Jackson out in almost a lawyer's brief, playing the part of witness and judge, too. Lurie's friendship with both men dates from 1955, when Merrill and Lurie's husband at the time both taught at Amherst College. The young Jackson-Merrill marriage seems to have appealed to Lurie even more than her own. One day at a picnic she cannot help but contrast them to her own work-obsessed husband, who hikes solo on his days off, and at one point actually bursts from the woods like an angry bear into the enchanted soiree Merrill and Jackson have staged. From that moment on, the reader senses, Lurie's own marriage is doomed, but she will be enthralled by the considerable Jackson-Merrill charm forever.

Indeed she is. She even survives a moment that might have turned away a friend with fainter heart. The center of this book deals with the period when Jackson and Merrill began using a Ouija board to contact (or create) spirits in the next world, whose messages Merrill turns into the poem that will make him famous. When Lurie asks one day which spirit is hers she learns: “It turned out I was on a rather low level: stage two, I think. (David and Jimmy had already attained level five.) In my last incarnation, I had been a nineteenth century English spinster named Helena Pons-Toby who was sent to Africa to convert the heathen. After a while the heathen found her so annoying that they murdered her. Though I didn't let on, I was deeply upset by the information. What it meant was that in spite of their affectionate kindness and generous hospitality, something in David's and/or Jimmy's subconscious regarded me as an intellectually and spiritually low-level person.” Though Ephraim, an important spirit, struck Lurie as “foreign, frivolous, intermittently dishonest, selfishly sensual, and cheerfully, coldly promiscuous” (ring a bell?), she became “a kind of Helena Pons-Toby: a prudish, judgmental friend who couldn't be trusted with their innermost secrets.”

Well, at least she's honest—and that's what saves the book. Familiar Spirits is not only a portrait of a glamorous literary couple but Lurie herself; the account of the collision between a straight, earnest, judgmental woman and a pair of gay men who seem to have been worldly, rich, ironic, and sensual. Part of the pleasure of this book is reading between the lines. Yet in her very skepticism about the Ouija board and the doctrines in that poem (“there is the repeated idea that homosexuality is a superior condition”) and her doubts about Merrill's character and conduct lies the book's value. Here is a woman captivated by a gay couple's charm (“… lunches in the garden with shrimp bisque and fresh Key West yellowtail and jokes and gossip; dinner parties with duets on the piano and Jimmy's homemade chocolate mousse …”) who inevitably collides with some things she finds not so charming.

When, for instance, one day Jackson tells Lurie he's been paying young men for sex, Lurie looks down into her iced mint tea to conceal her distaste (“Commercial sex seemed to me corrupt, low-grade, humiliating”) and in so doing realizes this was “the end of my real friendship with him.” Finally: “One morning when I stopped by without calling first, as I had so often done in the past, I was met in the hall by a half-dressed, sullenly embarrassed black teenager in stained yellow silk underpants who mumbled that Jimmy was out and David still in bed. I never visited again at any time of the day without calling first.”

Ah! Where was the stain, one wonders. In that scene is the whole book. Lurie doesn't like Merrill's last boyfriend either: “He was unusually beautiful, if you admire that sort of thing.” But her moral viewpoint, her affection and distaste, are the perfect foil to the sad, messy evolution of this lifelong marriage between two men who survived so much erosion: alcoholism, illness, wildly different levels of success. At times this memoir reads like a John Cheever story, or the last pages of Tender Is the Night. To her credit, Lurie herself isn't sure in the end what to decide of the denouement of both men. “It hadn't been Jimmy's fault,” she thinks as she lies awake one night pondering Jackson's decline, “but maybe there was something about Jimmy that had allowed it to happen: his unworldliness, his aesthetic detachment, his sense that words and ideas were realer than people.” This book is, unfortunately, delicious dish—the sort only survivors, perhaps unfairly, get to write—but it is also a moving portrait of friendship, not to mention a rumination on the collision of morality with aesthetics: the great conundrum of the artist's—and gay—life.