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LURIE, Alison

US novelist (1926-2020)

The people in Lurie's novels are all terribly nice: well educated, well off, well dressed, liberal and compassionate. Their lives are like placid pools - and into each of them Lurie drops the acid of discontent (usually something to do with sex) and invites us to smile as the water seethes. Her funniest books are set on university campuses: Love and Friend ship (see below) and The War Between the Tates (about the gradual collapse of a 'perfect' marriage under threat from a combination of adultery and student politics). The people of Imaginary Friends are participants in or investigators of a bizarre religious cult. The narrator of Only Children is a child, who reports on the sexual imbroglios of the adults around her with a wide-eyed gravity which arises less from innocence than from a precocious understanding not only of what is going on but of the sort of butter-won't-melt-in-my-mouth cuteness adults expect from little girls. In Foreign Affairs, three Americans are visiting England: Vinnie, a 54-year-old professor, Fred, a hunky young academic, and Chuck, a middle-aged, none-too-bright businessman on a package tour. The novel shows Vinnie’s attempts to bring into the two men’s lives the same kind of decorous, unflustered order she herself enjoys – and the way her own values crumple under the strain of real emotion.

LOVE AND FRIEND SHIP  (1962) About two people trapped in an affair (and what everyone else thinks about it); The War Between the Tates shows the gradual collapse of a perfect' marriage under threat from a combination of adultery and student politics

FOREIGN AFFAIRS  (1984) Three Americans are visiting England: Vinnie, a 54-year-old professor, Fred, a hunky young academic, and Chuck, a middle-aged, none-too-bright businessman on a package tour. The novel shows Vinnie's attempts to bring into the two men's lives the same kind of decorous, unflustered order she herself enjoys -- and the way her own values crumple under the strain of real emotion.

Lurie's other novels are Real People, a comedy about artists coping with inspirational blocks and sexual passion in a creative colony', A Nowhere City, a serious book about a woman trying to cope with unfocused psychological panic, and The Truth About Lorin Jones, about a woman writing the biography of a painter, whose life becomes totally entangled with the facts and emotions she is researching.

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The War Between the Tates

To Foreign Affairs : Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire

To The War Between the Tates : Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, The Injured Party Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant see also pathway

To Love and Friendship : David Lodge, Small World

To Only Children : Henry James, What Maisie Knew

To Lurie's work in general : Anita Brookner, Look at Me Alice Thomas Ellis, The Birds of the Air Gail Godwin , The Good Husband. Carols Shields, Larry’s Party Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

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