SOURCE: Costa, Richard Hauer. “Alison Lurie and the Critics.” In Alison Lurie, pp. 75-83. New York, NY: Twayne, 1992.

[In the following essay, Costa provides an overview of critical response to Lurie's work and the formation of her literary reputation, particularly as established in discussion of her two most prominently reviewed and debated novels, The War between the Tates and Foreign Affairs.]

THE MEDIA'S MASSAGE

Reviewers, by and large, have treated Alison Lurie well but superficially, as a sampling of dust-jacket endorsements reflects: poet James Merrill called her “the wisest woman in America”; Truman Capote believed The War between the Tates was a book Jane Austen would enjoy; Gore Vidal crowned her the “Queen Herod of modern fiction.” The War between the Tates brought her a place on the best-seller list, an international audience, and a media image as an irreverent satirist of middle-brow America.

Fortunately for sales but unfortunately for Lurie's credibility as a serious novelist, she has for nearly two decades been locked into this image. John Skow set the tone with his flippantly respectful review in Time of The War between the Tates (“In this summer-weight comedy of hanky-panky in a university town, the apple is a little mushy, but worm and novel are in the best of health”).¹ The three columns of text framed a photograph of Lurie, looking at once coy and wicked from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Ten years later she was a tenured full professor at Cornell, and Newsweek, in a review of Foreign Affairs, accentuated her academic persona with an apparently unposed classroom snapshot. But Lurie's “reputation for mordant wit and coldblooded satire,” as David Lehman puts it, remained intact. “I don't think I'm as cruel as I'm made out to be,” Lurie says. “Foreign Affairs is my seventh novel, and it's the first time I've ever killed off a single character. The people in my books may be ridiculed, but they don't lose their jobs, get run over by trucks or succumb to fatal diseases. The worse that can happen to them is that some of their illusions are exposed.”²

THE WAR BETWEEN THE TATES: “AN ANNOYING BOOK”

Reviews in the academic and intellectual press often praise Lurie's virtues before shooting her down for the perceived defects of these virtues. The most searching of this type of critique may have been John Leonard's essay on The War between the Tates in New Republic. After likening her to a surgeon putting on gloves before sitting down at her typewriter, Leonard summarizes the plot with skill and economy. He heralds the style (“faultless prose, like an English lawn [where] one could play polo”), ticks off a half-dozen “brilliant scenes,” and appears to marvel at the novelist's “detachment so profound that we might be looking at tropical fish in a tank instead of people in extremis.”³ He then confesses to having found The War between the Tates an “annoying book.” He charges Lurie with “punishing the Tates” for their anachronistic noblesse oblige, which leaves them at the end, in Erica's words, “ugly, foolish, guilty, and dying.” He deplores the programmatic analogies between war and what goes on between wives and husbands who are unhappy with each other. “The metaphor weighs a ton. Containment, escalation, guerilla warfare, hostages, are not so much alluded to as forced down the reader's throat. … [and] our foreign policy is not an extension of our boredom in the bedroom or our loathing of teenaged ingrates or our self-righteousness about marriage vows” (Leonard, 25).

Leonard makes his points well, but he overlooks Lurie's prerogative to put her characters through a punishing process that may be necessary if they are to move, even tentatively, toward self-knowledge. Leonard concludes by attacking Lurie's coldness, even contempt, in the face of human travail. John Cheever and John Updike have also walked on Lurie's “turf,” Leonard says, “Updike seeking some lyrical equivalent of the joy of discovery and the pain of betrayal” and Cheever finding “a redeeming humanity, sorrow instead of disgust.” In The War between the Tates, however, “Alison Lurie refuses to sympathize, and so this marvelously polished, splendidly crafted novel creates an antiseptic space in the mind; no one can live there” (Leonard, 25).

Robert E. Scholes has written that “every writer's work offers us a different system of notation, which has its focal limits in abstracting from the total system of existence.” If, then, each significant writer employs “narrative codes” that illuminate—even elucidate—his or her “version of reality,”⁴ then all accomplished representations of such individual world views merit consideration on their own terms. Perhaps the novelist who has made satire her narrative code runs the greatest risk of producing specimens, coolly dissected. Satire, by definition, chronicles folly to the end that institutions may be improved.

Deceit and camouflage are Lurie's enemies, and she attacks their practitioners without remorse. Sometimes, as Joseph Parisi observes, “the very brilliance of her technique becomes cause for dissatisfaction.” For all her characters' complexities, he adds, the unmasking process often reduces them to stock figures or Jonsonian humours, cleverly but predictably laid bare for ridicule.⁵

William H. Pritchard, in a brief review of The War between the Tates, finds Lurie “so confessedly pulling the strings (now I'm going to have my character do this) that it is difficult to look past her manipulative gestures, accomplished as always they are, and believe there's somebody really out there in trouble.”⁶ Or, as John Leonard puts it, The War between the Tates is inhabited by characters who are denied possibility. “Alison Lurie's clamp is on them. … It is not their fault that they are limited; it is hers” (Leonard, 25).

“HOW GOOD IS ALISON LURIE?”

One of the most severe critiques of Lurie's fiction through The War between the Tates is John W. Aldridge's “How Good Is Alison Lurie?” Like many other critics, Aldridge does praise Lurie's style and her powers of observation:

She writes a prose of great clarity and concision, an expository language that efficiently serves her subject but does not stylize upon it. She has many true things to say about the various modes of self-deception and distraction by which we endure the passage of life in these peculiarly trivializing times, and she often says them in a manner she has earned entirely by herself and that represents an authentic fictional voice.⁷

He then joins a more select group of reviewers who, even when citing what they perceive to be the virtues of her work, undercut their praise with criticism:

There is some firm evidence in the five novels she has so far published that Alison Lurie should be a better novelist than she is. Her reputation up to now does not indicate that she has been widely appreciated for the qualities she does possess, although she has acquired over the years a certain small cult following, and … The War between the Tates appears to be winning her the kind of popular attention which may prove only that her limitations have at last begun to be recognized as seeming more attractive than her virtues.

(Aldridge, 79, emphasis added)

The rest of the essay—about four-fifths of it—seeks to demonstrate that what Lurie has chosen to write about is unworthy of her attention and is rendered even less significant by her treatment. Specifically, Aldridge's criticisms include these: (1) She relies too heavily on sexual intrigue to fuel dramatic possibilities, (2) she works the same infidelity plot from book to book, and (3) her treatment of adultery is suggestive of soap opera—insufficiently revelatory for serious fiction. “Her treatment of adultery suffers, in short, from arbitrariness and inconsequence. The insight it affords us into the natures of the people who commit it is finally reducible to some idea of orgasmic liberation, which is repeatedly seen as in and for itself an apocalyptic experience” (Aldridge, 80).

Katharine Rogers has provided the most penetrating defense so far of Lurie's “adultery plot,” claiming that its very repetitiousness “enables her to explore varied aspects of her themes of marital discontent and female consciousness-raising” (Rogers, 118). She explains that while Lurie's unfulfilled wives “are not totally conventional … none has seriously questioned the fundamental assumptions with which she has been brought up. Although theoretically they had many choices in life, they have acted as if they had none. Having accepted the feminine mystique of the fifties, they devote themselves wholly to their families and expect marriage and children to provide … fulfillment” (Rogers, 117).

Thus, what Aldridge regards as a hackneyed plot in which good sex with someone not one's legal spouse “achieves some temporary sense of rejuvenated identity” is for Rogers a passport out of a false sense of self-assurance to a new potential for growth, whose immediate form may be passion, even ecstasy, but whose long-term achievement is self-knowledge. Rogers, a feminist scholar, concludes with the following observations:

This concern with awakening her heroines to look critically at their lives is what makes Lurie a feminist author. … her encouragement of radical questioning, symbolized by the respectable wife's trying out of adultery, is liberating. So, in a lighter way, is her deadly accurate rendition of the irritations and frustrations usual in marriage—obtusely self-centered husbands, ungrateful children for whose deficiencies their mother is made to feel responsible, an endless round of routine tasks, none of which are appreciated. … Lurie's adultery plot not only punishes these husbands as they deserve but highlights the husband's obliviousness to his wife's feelings and needs by contrasting it with the lover's attentiveness. The contrast is even sharper in the cases where the husband feels he is entitled to an extramarital affair because his wife is no longer giving him the devotion or excitement he considers his due.

(Rogers, 126)

Aldridge also takes exception to the value of the academic scene during the latter half of the century as a vehicle for satire. “Nothing is more obvious to anyone familiar with the university scene of the last twenty years than that the dramatic possibilities for a fiction dealing with academic life are not what they once were” (Aldridge, 81). He goes on to list Mary McCarthy (whom he once savaged in his essay “Mary McCarthy and the Trolls”), Helen Howe, Randall Jarrell, Robie Macauley, and Bernard Malamud as the “classic practitioners” of the novel of academe, saying that Lurie, in comparison, lacks “advantages,” none of which he identifies. Nothing is at stake in The War between the Tates, he writes—no risk, no threat, no anguish. “The society in which … [the Tates] exist is much too limited, drab, and morally diffuse to give them consequence. … It is a society made for and by the burgeoning new population of academic Babbitts, and it is the ideal medium for their relentlessly bourgeois pursuit” (Aldridge, 81).

Since the publication of his influential After the Lost Generation in 1951, Aldridge has continually denounced American novelists. He is a critic of the postwar scene whose constant refrain is that triviality in society begets triviality in its commentators. Ironically, Lurie shares Aldridge's view of society. His criticism of an ally raises the question of whether a satirical novelist can be faulted because her choice of evidence does not coincide with his.

LATE DIVIDENDS

The War between the Tates, which rose to the top of the New York Times fiction list in the late summer of 1974 and remained there throughout the fall and early winter, was followed by two books quite different in content and theme from her previous efforts. Only Children and Foreign Affairs are, in craft and language, her best novels to date. On this the major reviews are in agreement. With Only Children, it was for the first time her peers among female writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, and Victoria Glendinning, who paid her tribute.

Only Children (1979) embraced an idea Lurie had been nursing for years. She would blend, Proust-like, recovered memories of childhood and her understanding of the workings of children's imaginations with her scholar's knowledge of folklore and children's literature. She was coeditor, with Justin G. Schiller, of the 73-volume Classics of Children's Literature (1974-75). After the publication of Only Children she compiled three collections of retold stories for children: The Heavenly Zoo (1980); Legends and Tales of the Stars (1980); and Fabulous Beasts (1981).

Neither the Oates nor the Gordon review is a “puff”; each expresses a reservation—Oates on the book's lack of “amusing peripheral characters” evident in earlier works⁸ and Gordon on perceived lapses in conveying the tone of childhood (Gordon, 27). Gordon, however, is especially generous to Lurie for her rescue of objects from an all-but-lost past that we still crave and for her sure feel for the often unwitting cruelty adults inflict on their children. Oates also praises Only Children's briskness and verve, a triumph in the comic mode by one “who knows its contours and idiosyncrasies and its meticulous pacing exceptionally well” (Oates, 27).

Glendinning called Only Children “a powerful novel. Imaginary friends or real people, her characters live on in the mind. And the clear intellectual framework is effectively embedded in a totally realized world of food and clothes and furniture and weather. … The indecency of love—which is a classical concept, as this is a classical novel—is most people's lot.”⁹

Foreign Affairs, though it did not enjoy the commercial success of The War between the Tates, is Lurie's most critically acclaimed novel, both here and abroad. In England, Lorna Sage describes the novel as “the kind … that elicits a conspiratorial glow … because it flatters readers unmercifully” by leaving them “well-buttered with irony” (Sage, 109). American though she is, Lurie's writing resonates with the English literary past. Marilyn Butler, writing in the London Review of Books, finds the novel a major advance from the “programmatic naturalism” of previous books. “The nuanced and naturalistically-observed middle-aged love-affair between Vinnie and Chuck shows the kind of writing Lurie still perhaps does best, but her bold and freely-handled alternative plot enormously widens its range of suggestion.”¹⁰ It is difficult to conceive of an American novelist writing about London who is not faulted on details by English critics. Henry James did not escape, and neither does Lurie. Richard Boston and James Lasdun enumerate a number of gaffes, none of them substantive.¹¹

Among American reviewers, Dorothy Wickenden notes that Lurie, like most comic writers, relies on startling juxtapositions to illumine the individual's accommodations to the demands of society. She judges Lurie “as deft as ever when she turns to the mortifications of romance. She is an uncannily accurate observer of the ambivalent emotions that enter into unconventional sexual alliances. …”¹²

The most glowing assessment is Carol Simpson Stern's. She hails Foreign Affairs as “the best of her novels to date [because of] the daring way in which it treats (approvingly) Vinnie's affair with a Western bumpkin from Tulsa, Oklahoma. … hardly a suitable candidate for Vinnie's affections.”¹³ After faulting her previous novels for being sometimes unconvincing about sexual affairs between different types of people and lacking John Updike's “genius for sexually explicit scenes,” Stern comes down resoundingly in favor of this book. Lurie has found “the right ingredients. Not only do we believe in the sexuality of both characters, but we grow to care very much for Chuck and Vinnie. This facet … is surprising. Lurie's writing is always witty and tightly controlled, but she is usually best at making us laugh at, not with, her characters; in this book, we laugh, and finally cry, with the characters, not at their expense” (Stern, 548).

In Foreign Affairs, the reader is invited to glimpse the truth of Luis de Leon's maxim about the necessity of each person to act in conformity with nature and business.¹⁴ Vinnie Miner's sense of herself, fortress-like at the outset of the novel, resists siege and remains essentially intact. Fred Turner comes to recognize that his nature is to seek reconciliation on the homefront rather than find more enrichment abroad. At the same time, writes Margaret Ezell, Foreign Affairs wittily dissects “why we rarely get what we think we see in other people. Lurie takes both our expectations and disappointments and … wryly explores disillusionment [and] unexpected pleasures.”¹⁵

FEMINIST RESPONSE TO LURIE'S WORK

Shortly after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Affairs in 1985, Alison Lurie told a Dallas interviewer, “Someone who reads reviews will get to know what reviewers to trust. They'll know that if their reviewer likes something they'll probably like it too.” Of their value to writers, she was more problematical: “A critic who likes your work is on your wavelength and one who doesn't is not. You can't possibly please everyone. And some people you're going to annoy very much” (Satz, 196).

It has been Alison Lurie's fate to have annoyed a few critics and reviewers very much while pleasing the vast majority. Katharine Rogers notwithstanding, feminist critics are among those she has annoyed. Several see her heroines as taking bold steps against oppressive marriages only to retreat in the end. Lurie never permits peremptory action against the husbands; the issues between husband and wife are resolved by a reconciliation (The War between the Tates) or by an ambiguous separation (The Nowhere City).

Writing in Ms., Rachel B. Cowen finds that Erica Tate's war, while waged against the backdrop of the women's liberation movement, ends in misdirecting its lessons. Erica deploys the weapons and tactics of the movement against Brian while ultimately failing to use them as “tools for developing her own self-awareness.”¹⁶ As mentioned earlier, Rogers believes, to the contrary, that it is in the exploration of the development of self-awareness that Lurie excels (Rogers, 12).

Not all of Cowen's charges in “The Bore between the Tates” are based in feminist theory. She objects to Lurie's “caricatures” of the Tates and, even more, to those of their lovers. No single character of Lurie's has evoked more controversy than that of Wendy Gahaghan, the counterculture innocent who, in company with a kindred spirit, heads for Haight-Ashbury carrying her Indian apparel and Brian's child. Cowen protests: “If this were a popular novel written by a man, many feminists would feel justifiable rage at the scornful, stereotypical way her character is portrayed” (Cowen, 42). By dispatching Wendy, Cowen declares, Lurie has taken the easy way out.

Notes

1. John Skow, review of The War between the Tates, Time, 29 July 1974, 64.

2. David Lehman, “A Kind of Witchery,” Newsweek, 24 September 1984, 80.

3. John Leonard, review of The War between the Tates, New Republic, 10 August 1974, 25; hereafter cited in the text.

4. Robert E. Scholes, coauthor with Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 23.

5. Joseph Parisi, untitled entry, Contemporary Novelists (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), unpaginated.

6. William H. Pritchard, review of The War between the Tates, Hudson Review 28 (Spring 1975): 152.

7. John W. Aldridge, review of The War between the Tates, Commentary 59 (January 1975): 79; hereafter cited in text.

8. Joyce Carol Oates, review of Only Children, New York Times Book Review, 22 April 1979, 27; hereafter cited in text.

9. Victoria Glendinning, “Putting Away Childish Things,” review of Only Children, Book World, Washington Post, 29 April 1979, M5.

10. Marilyn Butler, “Amor Vincit Vinnie,” London Review of Books, 21 February 1985, 5-6.

11. Richard Boston, review of Foreign Affairs, Punch 288, no. 7520 (23 January 1985): 52; James Lasdun, review of Foreign Affairs, Encounter 65, no. 2 (July-August 1985): 47-51.

12. Dorothy Wickenden, review of Foreign Affairs, New Republic, 8 October 1984, 34-36.

13. Carol Simpson Stern, untitled entry, Contemporary Novelists, 4th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 548; hereafter cited in text.

14. Quoted in W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, in The Maugham Reader (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1950), 682.

15. Margaret Ezell, review of Foreign Affairs, in “Zest,” Houston Chronicle, 25 November 1985, 40.

16. Rachel B. Cowen, “The Bore between the Tates,” Ms., January 1975, 41; hereafter cited in text.