[In the following review, Annan finds shortcomings in The Last Resort's treatment of feminism and love.]

Alison Lurie's novels add up to an American Dance to the Music of Time, with the music modulating into a minor feminist key. As in Anthony Powell's sequence, characters from the earlier novels turn up again in later ones. But this is a smaller world. Everyone in it—except for deliberately dissonant outsiders—is an artist, writer, academic, or married to one. They are anchored either in New York or in East Coast Universities called Corinth or Convers, not unlike Cornell, where Lurie is Professor of American Literature. In her fourth novel, Real People (1969), a selection of her regulars are on view at a writers' retreat called Illyria. Writers and artists can escape to this beautiful country estate for a subsidized respite from their normal grind, and get on with creative work. The place once belonged to Undine Moffat, the heroine of Edith Wharton's novel The Custom of the Country; but real people like Milton Avery and Robert Lowell have stayed there (though none is in residence at the time of the action). This crossover between fact and fiction is as modern or postmodern as Lurie allows herself to get; she is a conservative writer.

When Christopher Isherwood reviewed her novel Foreign Affairs in 1984, he decided Lurie was “perhaps more shocking than she knows—shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet”. It is difficult to believe she doesn't know. She knows everything about her characters and their motives. They get no privacy, which means they have no mystery. Her beady eye doesn't spare even her heroines (there are no heroes). In fact, it is their own beady eye that makes these women morally uncomfortable—a chronic condition with them. Lurie is judgmental, and her pronouncements are prominently posted up. No change in fashion escapes her in any domain, from fashion itself to ecology and the use (misuse) of language. She tackles the Zeitgeist, and quite often gives it a bloody nose. In her time, she has taken on the Beat generation, New Age religion and the Peace movement. In her last two novels she is less severe: compassionate about AIDS, sympathetic shading to enthusiastic about lesbianism, and even-handed about environmentalism: she points out that in some circumstances it can be counter-productive. What has always and increasingly concerned her is the position of women. She examines what feminism does to them. From her first novel, Love and Friendship, in 1962, she has stood for the reasonable, nonaggressive kind—new feminism before it was invented.

Lurie doesn't seem to like men much, though, unless they're gay. Straight men are insensitive, vain and either predators or selfishly absorbed in work or birdwatching. They can be good in bed, though in her last two novels sex with women sounds even better. Lurie is a sexy writer on food as well as sex: adjectives like “soft” and “creamy” apply impartially to breasts and scrambled eggs, and sensuous interludes make delightful oases in deserts of inter-gender acrimony. Not that this ever gets boring; her dialogue is witty but completely plausible too, and there is plenty of it. The oddest thing about her novels is the clash between what looks like terminal incompatibility in a couple, and the happy or at least conciliatory ending. In Love and Friendship, for instance, beautiful, bouncy Emmy ditches a fascinating lover to return to a boring husband; in The War between the Tates (1974), admirable Erica takes back her unfaithful spouse after he makes a fool of himself with one of his students; and in Foreign Affairs, fifty-four-year-old, picky Professor Vinnie Miner ends up regretting that she wasn't nicer to the unpresentable elderly hick she met on the plane to London. He turned out to be a good man and good in bed, until he suddenly drops dead when she should have been with him but has selfishly chosen not to be.

Lurie likes her princesses to get happy with swineherds, or other socially or sexually unpromising partners. That is the subplot in The War between the Tates (Lurie's best-known work), and the main story in both The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988) and in her new novel, The Last Resort. In Foreign Affairs, Vinnie prevaricates over her swineherd, so she is punished and the happy ending falls to a pair of minor characters who patch up their marriage. The husband, another American academic on a London sabbatical, has a steamy affair with an aristocratic English actress. She turns out to be a dipsomaniac with a split personality. The drunken harridan with the Cockney accent who sometimes answers her door is her second self. The young man's discovery of this is the bombshell it should be. Lurie is not afraid of melodrama, and the lurid turning-points in her novels deliver shocks more like Genet than Austen.

Vinnie sounds like at least a partial self-portrait: a middle-aged American scholar with a London pad, who researches children's rhymes (Lurie has published a book about them herself). For English readers, this novel must be the most enjoyable. For it is topographically acute on London's communication systems, from bus routes to networking in the upper intelligentsia. Besides, it contains a most appealing invention called Fido, a soppy Welsh terrier who appears whenever Vinnie's self-pity sets in, and snuggles closer and closer. She is always fending him off, but in the end he pads after her on to the plane back to New York.

Vinnie is hardly a feminist at all. Feminism, like dyed hair, has dubious roots. In The War between the Tates, for instance, a woman deserted by her husband “nurses a grudge against men, which she has recently attempted to generalise and dignify as radical feminism”. By 1988, with The Truth about Lorin Jones, feminism ceases to be an undercurrent and becomes the dominant theme. That was Lurie's penultimate novel. In spite of the ten-year gap between it and The Last Resort, the two works are more closely linked than any of the others, if only by their Key West setting.

Key West is the westernmost of the Florida Keys. Hemingway made it fashionable, and the kind of people Lurie writes about like to winter there. She herself figures as a resident in Phyllis Rose's recent memoir, The Year of Reading Proust. They call it the last resort, “not just because it was at the end of the Keys, but because it was where you went when other places hadn't worked out”. This information comes from Lee Weiss, a warm, sensible, good-looking gay in her fifties. She runs a guest house for women in both Lurie's Key West novels, and provides delicious meals, physical and psychological comfort, and charitably reduced terms for the impecunious. She used to be a therapist in New York. Her name was Weissmann, but she dropped the masculine ending during her earlier, fiercer feminist phase which she now deplores; and she stopped being a therapist, because “half the time she was helping people she didn't like to become strong and confident enough to do things she didn't like, such as write deceptive advertising and sell jerry-built condos”. The sentence is an example of Lurie's packaging of information and ideas into neat vernacular parcels.

A rapacious female estate agent typifies the kind of woman Lee Weiss dislikes. She appears in The Last Resort, while Lee herself advances from supporting player to second lead. Lee is one of three exemplary women. The second is Molly, the widow of an academic. Molly is in her eighties, pre-feminist, horribly arthritic but uncomplaining, nicely dressed, charitable and lady-like, though no fool and capable of a sharp remark. The third is the pivotal heroine, Jenny. She is forty-six, beautiful, graceful and gentle, with long silky hair. (Lurie has two favourite female types: one looks like Jenny; the other is usually Jewish, dark, vital, and dressed in vermilion or scarlet, like Lee.)

Jenny has been happily married for twenty-five years to Professor Wilkie Walker, who is seventy to her forty-six and a famous naturalist/environmentalist. She worships him, and he adores and values her, even though he is an old-fashioned male chauvinist pig and homophobic to boot. All her adult life, Jenny has been his efficient cook-housekeeper, secretary, research assistant, editor and proof-reader, rejecting all suggestions from feminist friends that she should have her own career. (She is also the mother of their two satisfactory but uncongenial grown-up children.) It is clear that Lurie does not disapprove of Jenny's chosen way of life, and when someone calls her “a walking anachronism”, that person is noisy and drunk.

The shadow of age has fallen on the Walkers. Wilkie is on the last chapter of his last book, and it won't go right. His environmental theories are going out of fashion. He is still invited to write articles, speak at conferences, deliver lectures, but he senses that his role is now more grand old man than state of the art superstar. Besides, he has seen blood in his stool. It must be cancer. He doesn't want to drag out his suffering or Jenny's, so he decides to commit suicide—for her sake, he thinks, as much as for his. The result is that his behaviour towards her becomes secretive and cold, and she is miserable.

Then Lee enters her life. She rescues Jenny, first from a dangerous jellyfish in the sea, and then from unhappiness. She feeds her delicious shrimps and makes delicious love to her. In her earlier novels, Lurie wrote more about sex than love. Love was important; her characters might discuss it, long for it or lack it, but it happened off the page. In her last two novels, it has crept in Fido-like; and it can be embarrassing. Meanwhile, Wilkie's attempts to drown keep being foiled: by the wrong tide, by friends insisting on accompanying him to the beach, and by another suicide. The man who drowns has AIDS. He is in a wheelchair, and his companion has to position him to roll over the quayside edge. The young man is a charming Chinese waiter, and shattered by what he does. I found this episode more moving than anything else in Lurie's oeuvre.

While this is happening, Jenny is in Lee's house and arms and is planning to leave Wilkie, just as he is rushed to hospital with what looks like a heart attack. The doctor diagnoses a nasty gallstone, not dangerous; while the blood in his stool is not cancer but piles. All the same, shock, guilt and her fine WASP sense of duty persuade Jenny that her place is with her husband. The poor old man—for that is how she suddenly sees him—needs her. Still, the Walkers plan to stay on an extra two months in Key West, and spend half of every year there in future. So Jenny won't lose Lee. The ending is happy-ish, not ecstatic.

The novel doesn't remind one of Austen so much as of Daniel Deronda. Everyone has opinions or problems about the ethics of behaviour, especially their own; and they don't just act them out: they chew them over in their heads, and inflict them on whoever is around. Lee, for instance, pronounces on love: “Love is sort of ridiculous, sure … but it's also not ridiculous. The way I see it, anyone has a right to be in love. It's just a dumb convention that they have to be the same age and race and religion and class, and they can't be the same sex. You're just goddam lucky if you love anyone and they love you back.” I agree with every word, but so would most agony aunts, and they'd phrase it much the same way. Perhaps that is the point. But is lesbianism really just a last resort? Surely most lesbians would rate it higher.