SOURCE: Stark, John. “Alison Lurie's Career.” Hollins Critic 26, no. 1 (February 1989): 1-7.

[In the following essay, Stark provides an overview of Lurie's novels from Love and Friendship to The Truth about Lorin Jones, drawing attention to continuities and consistencies in the themes, settings, and characters of her fiction.]

American fiction would be far richer but for the truncated careers of many of its creators. Early spectacular success exacerbated a few writers' psychological problems. Others sustained development only briefly and either stopped producing or repeatedly wrote essentially the same work. Still others, more adventurous, did experiment but did so by writing types of fiction that were virtually certain to be trivial or that were uncongenial to their talents. Because of this unfortunate high incidence of stunted growth, one contemplates with pleasure the careers of those writers who have developed and who have created a substantial body of important fictional works. One such writer is Alison Lurie, who published her first novel in 1962, who published a fine novel in 1988 and who is likely to continue publishing first-rate novels.

Lurie has formed a career, rather than a mere series of books, partly because she seems to have tried to accomplish precisely that. One example of the shrewd, career-enhancing choices she has made is that of creating characters who are approximately the same age as she. The characters in her early novels are young, and the heroine of Foreign Affairs, published when she was fifty-eight, is a sensitively drawn older woman. That is, because in her fiction she has used her personal experiences of various stages of life she has automatically acquired interesting material as she has aged. She also uses some characters in more than one novel. L. D. Zimmern, for example, appears in four of her novels. By portraying these characters at different ages, in different milieus and while interacting with different characters she increases her understanding of them, and their reappearance makes the body of her work more coherent.

Aside from one or two false steps, Lurie has been able to mature as a writer while exploring basically the same fictional territory. The title of her first novel, Love and Friendship, an echo of one of Jane Austen's juvenile works (with the spelling corrected) suggests that her territory resembles Austen's. Austen's main characters—fairly well off financially and living in a compact society into which a few persons from other social classes intrude—are similar to Lurie's intellectuals and artists. Austen delineates her characters mainly by describing them searching for mates, but she de-emphasizes and only implies very obliquely the sexual components of those searches, whereas Lurie, writing at a time when reticence is no longer fashionable, moves sexual desire to the forefront, bluntly describes it and varies its forms. Both writers have a benevolently satiric attitude toward many of their characters, pointing out their absurdities, often by simply creating dialogue, but also by portraying their humanity.

To be more specific, Lurie's territory has often been a renamed Cornell University. The main characters in Imaginary Friends, The War between the Tates and Foreign Affairs are Cornell professors or spouses of Cornell professors. Cornell has played a major role in recent American fiction. For example, Richard Fariña was a student there and used Cornell as a setting in Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, and Thomas Pynchon was a Cornell student. Moreover, Vladimir Nabokov was for many years a Cornell professor. Lurie has taught creative writing and children's literature at that university since 1969. At times she playfully recognizes her university's literary tradition. In Imaginary Friends, for example, she refers to Professor Jack Shade, who is the mad annotator of Nabokov's Pale Fire. Her access to the intellectual life of a major university, as well as to the beauty of Cornell's campus, have been important benefits for her.

At first, Lurie did not approach Austen's complexity of vision and multiplicity of nuance, but by staying in her territory and usually choosing wisely the part of that territory to explore next, she began to develop. Her prose style reveals that development. In her early novels it is a bit wan, although appropriate to her realistic subject matter and reasonably effective. In her later novels, it is both more graceful and richer in figures of speech that illuminate her themes. Even more important, Lurie began to understand much better the ways in which her characters' intellectual and artistic activities influence the ways they perceive their experiences, which, in turn, influence their behavior. As we shall see, the most important leap forward in this respect occurs in Imaginary Friends.

In the novels that preceded that one, she creates characters who are academics or artists and understand events and persons accordingly. In her first novel the world they see is that of a college. In her second novel she makes a logical progression by bringing academics into a non-academic environment. Her third novel, Imaginary Friends, subtly examines the ways in which the intellectual constructs developed by her main characters, who are sociologists, influence their perceptions. In her most recent novel, The Truth about Lorin Jones, she takes yet another step forward and presents multiple perspectives, each based on a character's life and work and, although they result in conflicting versions of reality, each is partially valid. Lurie takes this most recent step without resorting to pop-Heisenbergianism: belief that a perceiver by interacting with a perceptual field makes it impossible for himself or herself to determine accurately the nature of the things perceived.

Lurie began her career as a novelist with Love and Friendship (1962), which describes the insular world of a liberal arts college in New England and centers on a faculty wife's affair and later reconciliation with her husband. Lurie enlivens her treatment of this familiar material by making Miranda Fenn, another faculty wife, the agent of the affair. Miranda, the first in a series of manipulative women in Lurie's fiction, works subtly, even calls herself a magician, but more closely resembles a Prospero than a Miranda, setting loose the magic force of sexual desire to disturb the bucolic, placid scene. The convincing density of detail makes the setting and plot credible but, notwithstanding Miranda's alleged magic, the plot rarely surprises. Moreover, the setting, plot and themes do not intertwine very elaborately. For example, the fact that the characters are academics does not have much to do with their actions. Nevertheless, the story moves along and indicates that Lurie understands motivation.

In this novel a reader can see the rudimentary form of Lurie's later fully developed use of multiple perspectives. Miranda's son Richard provides a child's view of the action, but in his charming eccentricity he more closely resembles the rustic cleaning woman in this novel than the children in Lurie's later novels, who perceive the action in a genuinely child-like way. Lurie also interrupts the narrative's flow with letters written by a homosexual novelist who is a visiting professor at the college and who sees its life as considerably more comic than do the other characters. The third perspective on the action, a humanities course required of all freshman, does not quite come off. It has something to do with dissolving preconceptions and forcing students to construct their own ethics, but its goals, and their relations to the novel's plot and themes, never become totally clear.

In Nowhere City (1965) Lurie moves to the very boundary of the territory she had begun to stake out in her first novel. She describes a fledgling historian and his wife in Southern California, where he has taken a non-academic job. Lurie eschews the expected academic perspective by having the historian at first like California. Rather than using the opportunity to do historical analysis presented by having the main character be an historian, Lurie has him announce that Southern California is outside time and history. Having renounced those perspectives, she turns on the California scene, but the targets—beatniks, a defense contractor, a society psychiatrist, various Hollywood types, etc.—are so easy to attack that she does not develop any other perspectives. Thus, this book presents social observation, some of it shrewd, but, lacking a coherent point of view, it is not really satire.

The multi-perspective strategy is more jejune in Nowhere City than it is in Love and Friendship. The beatniks inveigh, but not very originally, against “the establishment,” to which most of the other characters belong. Lurie somewhat complicates her portrait of California by having the historian and his wife switch perspectives. Frustrated by his job and the waning of his affair with a beatnik, he begins to dislike California, and at the novel's end he returns to Massachusetts; whereas, initiated into the California life style by the seductive psychiatrist, she begins to like it, and she stays. However, none of the conceptions of California in this novel is very convincing, nor do the simplified pictures of the various segments of the society induce the view that California is so complex that multiple perspectives are needed if one is to comprehend it.

At this point in her career Lurie had shown considerable promise but had not really settled in as a novelist. However, her next novel, Imaginary Friends, fits into her career as does Barbary Shore into Norman Mailer's. It is an interesting but not well known book during the writing of which the author found his or her proper niche, thereby making possible the major works that followed. Lurie achieves a breakthrough probably because she extensively delineates an academic perspective on a radically non-academic environment. This novel is about an established sociologist and a young sociologist who join a group of spiritualists in a nearby village in order to study them. By describing the interaction between these drastically different kinds of person, the only partially successful efforts of the sociologists to maintain their discipline's perspective despite personal attachments to some of the spiritualists and the theoretical differences between the two sociologists and other members of their department, Lurie makes an epistemological analysis of sociology. That is her breakthrough.

Tom McMann, the established sociologist, believes that a small group maintaining a delusionary system will react to opposition by increasing its certitude and becoming more cohesive. Because his reputation has plummeted and his views on sociology are rejected by the majority of the persons in his department, his theories about opposition and certitude have a personal dimension. The young sociologist, Roger Zimmern, begins to realize that McMann, in order to confirm his preconceptions, influences the spiritualists' behavior. To preserve his beliefs McMann even announces that he has absorbed extraterrestrial power, goes berserk and ends up in a mental institution. Roger becomes more confused as he realizes that McMann is far from an objective observer, that his own feelings skew his perceptions, that the spiritualists are a parody of academia and that he does not know whether McMann is insane or merely pretending to be so. In short, Lurie demonstrates that the relation between sociology and truth is very complicated.

As it does in several of Lurie's other novels, in Imaginary Friends sexual desire erodes rational analysis. The most obvious instance is Zimmern's desire for Verena, whose purported ability to communicate with beings from another planet caused the group to form. To a lesser extent she reciprocates his desire, but she is more strongly attracted to a young man who is briefly part of the group but renounces them. When she runs away with that young man the group disintegrates. Moreover, McMann convincingly asserts that her repressed sexuality causes her spiritualistic beliefs. Nor is McMann immune. He reveals that even though he is institutionalized he is having sexual relations with the other dominant woman in the group, which suggests that his desire for her earlier influenced his perception of the group. The scene in which Verena hugs Zimmern and rubs his bare back while she claims to be using spiritual power to heal his bruise and he tries to resist caressing her so that the sociological study will not be disrupted is paradigmatic.

Although Zimmern's conceptions become increasingly addled, this novel does not dissolve into nihilism. Lurie consistently indicates that self-deception, particularly if sexual desire induces it, is dangerous and that a purely sociological view of human behavior is reductionist. Her comic vision also implies that some things are ineluctable. For example, the spiritualists' burning of their clothes made from natural materials and their desperate search for synthetic substitutes that they believe will not block communications from another planet are, by any measure, ludicrous. Also, a reader who thinks that the visitors from outer space expected by the spiritualists will actually arrive is missing the novel's point. Far from demonstrating that truth is unobtainable, this novel suggests that persons who are skeptical about theoretical systems, have an eye for the absurd and are wary about deceiving themselves can understand persons and events.

In Real People (1969) Lurie describes another small, isolated society, an artists' colony resembling Yaddo, where she has been in residence. At first the colony seems to be an idyllic place that will release the artists' creative energy, a place where “one becomes one's real self, the person one would be in a decent world,” but gradually the artists become less productive and more childish. For instance, Janet, a writer of fiction whose diary constitutes this novel, has temporarily left her mundane family, hoping to revitalize herself and her work, but she allows herself to be seduced by a crude sculptor whose material, appropriately, is junk, and, prompted by a friend, she develops serious misgivings about her writing, particularly about her reluctance to write anything that may embarrass her family. A young girl, another of Lurie's manipulative women, by attracting most of the men present with her beauty and flattery, becomes the main cause of the colony's failure.

This novel is a parable about the artist's relation to the world. The girl whose presence at the colony raises this issue is Anna Mae Mundy (probably a reference to anima mundi: the world's spirit). Janet's experiences at the colony teach her that an artist cannot retreat from the world but must learn to reconcile his or her personal and artistic lives. Janet's conception of Anna Mae, the world, changes as she attempts that reconciliation and tries to increase her self-understanding. That is, in this novel Lurie examines her own intellectual discipline, fiction, and its relationship to the world. Because her narrator is re-examining herself and her work, Lurie presents various conclusions. This tentativeness does not vitiate the novel; in fact, Lurie convincingly remarks that fiction, by presenting a topic from various perspectives, creates a condensed version of reality.

Lurie's next book, The War between the Tates (1974), was her first triumph: it was a best seller and was lavishly praised by reviewers. In it Erica Tate discovers that her husband Brian, a political science professor at a university that is easily recognizable as Cornell, is having an affair with a graduate student. Not surprisingly, their marriage dissolves, although at the novel's ending it seems to be re-forming. Lurie has ingeniously chosen as her subject the pressures on the marriage of a political scientist during the era when the pressure on the U.S. government to end the Vietnam war and the concomitant pressures on U.S. universities were near their zenith. This novel realistically depicts sexual, family, academic and national politics and includes a theoretical dimension consisting of Brian's occasional analysis from the perspective of his political theories of the events in which he is caught up. This mixture may sound contrived, but the chain of events is impeccably constructed and enlivened by Lurie's wit.

Thus, the use of multiple perspectives, which has become one of Lurie's trademarks, results from the interaction of the various types of politics. Sometimes she is explicit about the light that one kind of politics casts on another. Brian fashions a witty analogy between the national administration's efforts to deal with the Vietnamese government and his own efforts to deal with his two obnoxious adolescent children. Other analogies are implicit. For example, Brian's affair progresses in almost imperceptible increments, each apparently innocent, until he is in an impossible situation, just as the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam progressed until it, too, became impossible. This elaborate network of interrelations among political realms cleverly indicates that the flaw in Brian that causes his downfall is his adherence to the political theory of “spheres of operation.” Lurie suggests that life cannot validly be compartmentalized.

Only Children (1979) interrupts a sequence of five solid novels, because in it Lurie makes several tactical errors. She uses some of her familiar material—the small isolated group, multiple perspectives and the pressure of sexual desire—but she abandons the academic scene she has depicted so well and, setting this novel during the Depression, sets aside her impressive apprehension of contemporary phenomena. Her second perspective is that of several children, which is created by depicting their reactions and by evoking the world of children's literature, which is a specialty of Lurie's. That perspective unfortunately is neither very interesting nor subtle enough to cast much light on the events narrated. One can admire the risk-taking involved in writing this novel, but the kinds of risks were not right and the execution is not up to her usual standard.

Luckily, she quickly righted her course, producing next Foreign Affairs (1984), a first-rate novel that won a Pulitzer Prize. This novel has two plot lines that occasionally intersect and that implicitly comment on each other. Each is about an American professor of English on leave in England who becomes involved with someone of the opposite sex. Although they are in the same department, they barely know each other. One, Fred Turner, in the tradition of his academic specialty, the eighteenth century, becomes entranced with a glamorous actress. Unfortunately, the qualities that he thinks are charming eccentricities are actually symptoms of mental problems. His pursuit of her exacerbates her problems, as well as spoiling his research and lacerating him. His only consolation is his apparently imminent reconciliation with his estranged wife. When he departs from England he leaves behind chaos because he cannot escape the preconceptions caused by his academic study.

At first Vinnie Miner, a children's literature specialist, is even more a captive of her academic perspective than is Fred. The man next to her on the airplane that takes her to England repels her because he is the antithesis of an academic. However, an encounter with a mercenary, foul-mouthed child while she is collecting children's rhymes somewhat shakes her preconceptions. After her former seatmate seeks her out, she begins to realize that he speaks good sense, although not in her dialect. She comes to think of him not as the quintessence of crudity but as a quaint figure like some she recalls from folklore. After she sees as human rather than absurd his attempts to find some meaning for himself, she realizes that, from another viewpoint, she, too, looks absurd. She wishes to be an English lady as much as he wishes to be an English lord. By developing a double perspective on herself—an interesting development of that Luriean motif—she becomes less self-centered and thus able to respond to his affection, although not as ardently as she wishes she had after she learns that he has died.

In her most recent novel, The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988), Lurie makes her most sophisticated use yet of multiple perspectives. This is the story of the attempts by a former painter, Polly Alter, to write a biography of a dead painter. Narrative sections alternate with the responses of persons whom Polly interviewed, each of whom has a very different conception of Lorin. In addition to presenting a believable account of the world of artists, dealers, critics and collectors, this novel is painterly in that many of its figures of speech are based on painters and paintings. Encouraged in these ways to think in artistic terms, one eventually realizes that Lorin Jones is like an abstract painting in which different viewers see different things. Polly at first is distressed by the multiplicity of viewpoints she discovers, but at last she recognizes that she need not choose among them but can write a biography that accurately presents each of them.

Polly had assumed that she would write an anti-male book, castigating each of the men in Lorin Jones's life for abusing her and terminating her artistic development. Some of her friends, who are shrill radical feminists, abet her in this intent, and one draws her into a lesbian affair. However, she becomes attracted to each of those men, especially the last man with whom Lorin lived, Hugh Cameron, and sees validity in their negative conceptions of Lorin. While trying to understand Lorin Jones, Polly also is trying to decide on her career goals and the relation she wishes to have with men. At this novel's end these three quests converge. She decides that she will present Lorin from many perspectives, that she will accept whatever consequences to her career flow from the resulting book and that she will admit to herself that men are exceedingly complex, too, not simply demons. That last admission allows her to call Hugh Cameron in hopes of continuing her relationship with him. Seeing things from more than one angle appears to be the way of wisdom, as well as the artistic strategy by means of which this excellent novel was composed.

There is no reason why a graph of Alison Lurie's career will not indicate a rise even beyond the point of The Truth about Lorin Jones. She has created several characters that would be worth using again. Most notable among them is Zimmern, who has been a minor figure in several novels and could very well be the focus of a future novel. Lurie has also effectively portrayed characters whose age is close to hers and has written several novels about writers, so a novel about an accomplished writer looking back upon a successful career would be an intriguing possibility. It also would be justified: she has in fact had a successful career.