SOURCE: Simon, Linda. “Something That Is Gone.” World and I 14, no. 2 (February 1999): 285.

[In the following review, Simon comments that Lurie displays her talents as an astute observer of quirky, trendy, contemporary life in The Last Resort.]

Since 1962, when she published her first novel, Love and Friendship, Alison Lurie has carved out a special literary territory: troubled marriages in academia, bewilderment among the intelligentsia. As Lurie sees it, being well read and articulate does not guard against bad, bumbling, or silly choices. Erudition does not grant immunity from the longings that beset a wider range of humanity: the desire to transgress the boundaries of one's identity, to break some rules, to seek excitement—even, perhaps, a bit of wildness.

Among her eight previous novels, perhaps the best known is The War between the Tates, published in 1974, which charts the messy marital problems of a political science professor, Brian Tate, and his wife, Erica. The novel is set in the academic community of Corinth University (read Cornell, where Lurie, a professor in the English department, teaches children's literature). Brian, suffering from a typical midlife crisis, has an affair with one of his students; when Erica discovers his adultery, it precipitates her own noisy crisis.

But Lurie is interested in more than turbulence in the Tates' marriage. By setting the novel in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War and the vociferous feminist movement strained and assaulted personal relationships, Lurie has a chance to explore the way social and political events intersect with private life, the ways that these events shatter cherished illusions and generate volcanic personal eruptions.

Ten years after The War between the Tates, Lurie published Foreign Affairs (which won a Pulitzer Prize), again drawing her characters, Vinnie Miner, a fifty-something professor of English, and Fred Turner, Miner's much-younger colleague, from the Corinth faculty. Miner and Turner spend a sabbatical semester in London, each intent on a research project. But they find their attentions turning to more than literary matters: Sex and sensuality, love and friendship, yearning and regret become their preoccupations.

Although this novel, with its international juxtapositions, inspired some critics to compare Lurie to Henry James, Lurie is far less interested than James was in the covert psychological motivations of her characters; instead, she offers a satiric, ironic, comic rendition of their troubles—what one critic called a “snappy Lurie commentary on trendy contemporary life.” Lurie is, indeed, an acute observer of trends, quirks, and social types—a talent amply evident in her latest novel, The Last Resort.

EXTINCTION

The last resort of the title is Key West, where Lurie lives for part of each year. “Key West can have a transformative power,” Lurie told an interviewer recently. “Part of it is the tropical lushness, unlike anywhere else in the country. But I think what's important is the people. You can find gingerbread houses in lots of other places. But you might not have the tolerant atmosphere that fosters eccentricity in Key West.” For northerners, of course, Key West is one destination offering a respite from winter, and the transformative power need be nothing more than sunshine. But Jenny Walker, the novel's central character, hopes for a deeper and more pervasive transformation for her husband, her marriage, and herself.

Jenny is the much-younger wife of Wilkie Walker, a 70-year-old naturalist who teaches at Convers College, a small liberal arts institution located in a picturesque New England town. Besides being a professor, Walker also is a famous writer, an environmentalist whose works inspired a movement to save the salt marsh harvest mouse from extinction. Now at the end of his career, Wilkie is frustrated that the environmental movement seems mired in sentimentality, that his own contributions have been commercialized and trivialized, and especially that the environment is still deteriorating at a rapid pace.

But there is more upsetting Wilkie than his professional life. Despite his physician's assurance that he is healthy, Wilkie thinks he is dying of cancer, and he has become inconsolably depressed at the thought of his own imminent extinction. Refusing to discuss his fears with his wife, he simply withdraws; instead of finishing his latest book—a study of a majestic copper beech tree on the Convers campus—he spends all his time hatching a plan to commit suicide and make the act look like an accident.

After more than twenty years of a happy marriage, Jenny does not understand what has happened when Wilkie suddenly becomes irritable and dismissive. She is hurt, she is rejected; taking advice from her daughter, a medical student who diagnoses Wilkie's behavior as clinical depression, she decides that Wilkie needs to rest, to escape the dark and chilly New England winter, to look out on a new prospect. She suggests that they spend a few months in Key West. Wilkie, immediately envisioning the churning sea as a potential site for his demise, agrees.

Now Jenny is an unusual character for contemporary fiction: an exemplary wife. She has sought no sources of fulfillment outside of raising her two children, maintaining a home, and, most important, serving as her husband's confidante, research assistant, secretary, and sometime ghostwriter. If the feminists among the Convers faculty look with disdain at Jenny's choices, she herself has been unusually satisfied and happy living her life as Mrs. Wilkie Walker.

Jenny's selfless devotion to her marriage and her husband's career makes his inexplicable withdrawal all the more distressing for her. What has she done wrong, she wonders? Has he lost interest in her as a woman? Is he tired of her? Has she failed him? Jenny is deeply worried but hopeful that the edenic landscape of Key West will revive the warmth in her marriage.

If Wilkie's fears and Jenny's worries imply a serious and even dour plot, the result is far different. This is a typical Lurie novel: a gossipy, slightly malicious comedy featuring a motley cast of characters. Lurie's strength as a novelist is plot twists rather than characterization, and critics have sometimes accused her of creating unsympathetic—even harsh—portraits of the men and women who people her novels. Here, however, Lurie, now 72, treats the aging Wilkie with some measure of sympathy, although she still portrays him as self-absorbed, elitist, and even misogynist. And though Lurie clearly respects Jenny for the choices she has made in her life, still Jenny emerges as more than a bit naive and even self-righteous in her single-minded devotion to her husband. Not until the last moments of the book does Jenny assert herself, gently of course, against her husband's apparently mild but still insistent direction of her life.

MAGIC ISLAND

Lurie paints Key West in pastels, with its sun-dappled gardens, open-air restaurants, and long, sandy beaches. Tourists, who arrive throughout the winter, spend their days “splashing in the warm ocean, or lazing in the warmer sand, watching the slow waves lick the shore.” They frolic like children: window-shopping and licking ice-cream cones, throwing Frisbees, and, at night, crowding into bars to listen to loud music.

Lurie contrasts these holiday seekers with the year-round residents, men and women who may have come as tourists but then stayed to assume civic responsibility. Key West, after all, has the kind of problems that beset any community: pollution—in this case, debris floating onto the beaches—a homeless population, and a threatened ecosystem. Still, like the tourists they once were, the year-round residents see Key West as a haven, even a refuge, from their former, less sunny and benign, lives. They have come to reinvent themselves; not all succeed.

Lurie's characters are a predictable group for the 1990s, familiar types that populate much recent fiction. There is Lee Weiss, the strong, independent lesbian and outspoken feminist; Jacko, the attractive, wise, and gentle HIV-positive homosexual; Molly Hopkins, the elderly widow, depressed about feeling irrelevant and tired of witnessing other people's foibles; Barbie Mumpson, who also appeared in Foreign Affairs, the wife escaping her cheating husband (he is a politician, but that should surprise no one); Myra, Barbie's domineering mother (the woman with impeccable fashion sense and a steely will); and Gerry Grass, the self-important, middle-aged poet, accompanied by his ditsy young girlfriend (here she is named Tiffany, and Lurie makes her an accountant).

For Jenny, the most important character is Lee Weiss, who had come to Key West twenty-five years earlier, escaping an oppressive marriage. Discovering her identity as a lesbian, Lee is now the owner of a women's guesthouse. One day, despite a placard warning “Danger: Men-of-War,” Jenny decides to go swimming, is stung by a jellyfish, and is rescued by Lee, who immediately falls in love with her. The two are thrown into each other's company when Jenny, in need of something to occupy her empty days, takes a part-time job at Lee's guesthouse. Desperately in need of a confidante, Jenny turns to the sympathetic Lee. The two women become close friends, and then, although Lurie gives us few details, lovers.

This relationship serves to liberate Jenny from Wilkie's domination and, Lurie implies, to open up new paths of self-fulfillment. Jenny is not the only character whose life is changed in Key West. Gerry, the poet, after being dumped by Tiffany, finds self-enlightenment, limited, of course, by his large ego. Barbie, who arrives feeling emotionally battered and lost, discovers a passion for ecology and mounts a campaign to save the endangered manatee. Despite her mother's admonitions, she will not return to her philandering husband.

The most subtle and believable changes, though, occur for the two eldest characters: Wilkie and Molly. Both face death, both feel useless. But as Molly learns from Jacko, each must make a choice to focus on life or on death. “The way I figure,” he tells Molly, “everyone is living, everyone is dying.” In that case, he decides, you might as well indulge in living joyfully and well. Wilkie, finally convinced that he is not dying but has many healthy years ahead of him, discovers the pleasures of being “a kind of elder statesman” among naturalists. He enjoys his celebrity, finishes his book, and engages in talks, symposia, and a renewed relationship with Jenny. If his former role as activist and gadfly no longer is appropriate, he is persuaded that he can take an important new role: raising money, guiding younger people, and influencing change.

Lurie chose as an epigraph for the novel three lines from Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”

But there's tree, of many one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone.

Wilkie's imagined brush with death teaches him to look not at what might be gone tomorrow but at what is here today: the ancient copper beech tree, his good wife, and the small delights of each moment.