“England, for Vinnie, is and always has been the imagined and desired country. For a quarter of a century she visited it in her mind, where it had been slowly and lovingly shaped and furnished out of her favorite books…”
The aptly titled Foreign Affairs is Alison Lurie’s novel about two American academics who travel abroad and see the world anew as they engage in romantic affairs only to discover that their idea of foreign people and places are not always what they seem. In an interview, Lurie stated that she constructed Foreign Affairs out of a general theme –after taking many trips abroad, she noticed that her friends were often given a second chance at life while traveling around Europe, experiencing romance, and seeing life through new eyes. Situated nicely in the shadow of Henry James, Foreign Affairs‘ presents a personal revival for Vinnie Miner, an uptight, middle-aged expert on nursery rhymes; and Fred Turner, a young and handsome but broke scholar of 18th century literature; both of whom learn new things about themselves via separate romantic dalliances. Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1985, and was nominated for the 1984 National Book Award as well as the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
In Foreign Affairs, the book is neatly divided into twelve chapters, with every other chapter offering either the perspective of Vinnie Miner or Fred Turner (six chapters apiece). And each chapter has a unique epigraph related to both characters’ particular area of study –the chapters for Fred begin with John Gay quotes, while Vinnie’s chapters begin with old children’s rhymes. Virginia “Vinnie” Miner is a fifty-four-year-old tenured “Spinster Professor” of English literature at Corinth College (a fictional college created by Alison Lurie based on Cornell University). Her focus is on the play-rhymes of British and American children, her professionally published name is “V.A. Milner.” She is “small, plain, and unmarried –the sort of person that no one ever notices” and “a woman without physical charms,” her hair is a “natural piebald gray-beige.” She is the only child of squeamish parents; she is somewhat superstitious, but certainly not religious. Interestingly enough, she is not celibate either, though she believes she is something of “a disadvantaged woman, doubly disadvantaged now by age; someone men would not charge at with bullish enthusiasm no matter how many brightly colored objects she waved to attract their attention. Well, at least she could avoid being a figure of fun. If she couldn’t look like an attractive woman, she could a least look like a lady.” Vinnie is currently in London on a six-month foundation grant so she can work on a new book about children’s folk rhymes. Despite being a contemporary folklorist of children’s schoolyard rhymes, many people wrongly assume that Vinnie loves children, and that her own lack of them is a tragedy, but on the contrary, she thinks children (especially American ones) are “competitive, callous, noisy, and shallow, at once jaded and ignorant as a result of overexposure to television, babysitters, advertising, and video games.”
On the flight out to London, Vinnie reads The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell (or “Jim” Farrell as she calls him), the third book in his Empire trilogy and a satirical work about Japan’s entry into World War II (the title is also a sexual reference). She is also reading a scathing critique of her own work, “A comparative investigation of the play-rhymes of British and American Children,” which is published in The Atlantic by a cynical critic named Leonard “L.D.” Zimmern (a character who reappears in several other Lurie novels). He writes about how Vinnie’s academic research into children’s schoolyard rhymes is yet another example of wasted public funds and that her inane academic discipline is causing the decline of the humanities and so on. Meanwhile, Vinnie is unfortunately seated on the plane next to a large, hulking, buffoonish Oklahoman tourist (or a “Sun Tourist”) named Charles “Chuck” Mumpson, a sanitation engineer from Tulsa specializing in waste disposal systems. He is married with two children but his wife has remained back in Oklahoma working in real estate. Vinnie can barely stomach his ignorance when he attempts to socialize with her: “You’re an English teacher? Gosh, I better watch my language, I was always a dumbhead in English.” She characterizes comments like these as “the debased and meaningless jesting common among half-literate middle Americans.”
However, despite Vinnie’s eagerness to depart from this comical simpleton, throughout her sabbatical in London –wherein she interviews numerous schoolchildren about their sing-song rhymes for her forthcoming book (sometimes offended by what she hears)– she accidentally continues to run into Chuck all over the city. Surprisingly, she starts to develop a somewhat embarrassing romantic attraction to Chuck even though all of her snobby academic friends would find Chuck utterly intolerable. Her head rejects Chuck, while her heart is drawn to him. In time, we learn more about Chuck. He is retired with seemingly limitless money, and his relationship with his wife has been significantly strained in recent years. He is visiting England to trace his genealogy. In sympathy, Vinnie helps Chuck in his efforts to track down his ancestors in England –in particular, she points him in the right direction when she learns he has been told of an ancestor also named Charles Mumpson who was once known as the Hermit of Southley, a noble historical figure in rural England. But when Chuck finally looks into the story of this ancestor, he learns he was just a “dirty old bum” who was little more than an “illiterate pauper.” This discovery greatly upsets Chuck because his wife’s Myrna’s family has a certain nobility to them, they can trace their lineage all the way back to the American Revolutionary War. For this, Chuck resents them, because they have always looked down on Chuck and his working-class profession. Not long ago, he took a golden handshake from his sanitation company, but he has been unable to find another job (presumably because of his age), and he has started drinking. One day, he drank too much and got a DWI in a crash with a teenage boy who was on amphetamines. After this, his wife Myrna stopped even looking at him. Thus, his trip to England was mostly a desperate effort to learn if his ancestors were actually, to some degree, high-born individuals. Though after turning up nothing, he contemplates suicide in order to send a message to Myrna and rid himself of the inner torment he feels after the car crash.
Naturally, Vinnie and Chuck sleep together and Vinnie is surprised at what a passionate lover Chuck is. In fact, Vinnie is a fairly sexual woman, she often sleeps with men. She once married a man who was on the “tearful rebound from a particularly aggravating beauty and, like a waterlogged tennis ball, had rolled into the nearest hole” (75-76). They were married for three years, but while he regained his confidence with Vinnie, he apparently also slept with one of her students and then one of Vinnie’s friends, so they divorced. Over the years, Vinnie has kept many imaginary lovers, all of them older and intellectual, often authors or literary figures. In fact, her imagination is quite vivid –throughout the novel, she imagines a dog called “Fido” who follows her around. And in later interviews Alison Lurie pointed out that the size of Fido in the book is directly connected to Vinnie’s sense of self-esteem: at the start of the book, he is large, and halfway through the book he runs off with Chuck, but by the end he is a small dog, showcasing Vinnie’s character growth as the book ends. At any rate, now in her mid-fifties, Vinnie thinks it’s time to start acting her age and rejecting erotic impulses in order to “steer past the Scylla and Charybdis of elderly sexual farce and sexual tragedy into the wide, calm sunset sea of abstinence, where the tepid waters are never troubled by the burning heat and chill, the foamy backwash and weed-choked turbulence of passion” (78). She despises herself for sexually engaging with Chuck, even though she enjoys it. If her friends ever find out about Chuck they might judge her differently
Along with Vinnie, we also meet Fred Turner, a tall, handsome nearly twenty-nine-year-old PhD who is researching John Gay, an 18th century English poet and dramatist. His money is dwindling and he is taking out loans from the Corinth University Credit Union to finance his lifestyle in London. Often mired in a miserable mental state, Fred floats in and out of the British Museum (or “bowel movement” as he calls it), and we learn more about his troubled, estranged relationship with his wife Ruth “Roo.” Much of their quarrel seems to stem from a recent photography exhibit she hosted in which she displayed several photos of genitalia (including Fred’s own, without even asking him). This was along with other nude, unknown men in the exhibit. In the novel, Fred refers to his marriage as a “emotional disaster, a failed adventure.”
In seeking comfort, Fred finds himself falling into the arms of an older but glamorous actress named Rosemary Radley (is she thirty-seven or forty-four?). She is a thespian whose specialty is highborn women of every historical period from classical Greece to modern Britain. She is currently starring in a British television show called “Tallyho Castle.” Throughout Foreign Affairs, Fred and Rosemary’s tempestuous, torrid affair is a wild, passionate romance as they attend the theatre and various parties together, all the while she constantly speaks like an old aristocrat from an Edith Wharton novel (constantly addressing Fred as “Oh Darling”). But when it comes time for Fred to begin preparing to return to the United States for his busy teaching schedule in the fall, Rosemary turns into a basket case, refusing to return his calls and completely ignoring him altogether. He tries to track her down but only seems to find her housekeeper around –Mrs. Harris. Eventually, Fred confronts Rosemary on the set of her television show where she offer sfor him to stay in England and essentially live wither her as a kept man. While he admits to being emotionally and physically obsessed with Rosemary, he soon comes to realize that she is completely unstable and possibly an alcoholic. His dreary American friends Joe and Debbie Vogeler (and their year-old baby) are as unimpressed with the whole situation as they are with everything in London.
Fred’s wife, Roo, sends him a contrite letter, apologizing for exposing his genitals in her photography exhibit, and hoping they can reunite when he returns. At first, Fred leaves the letter without a response for several weeks until he finally decides to return to the U.S. He makes one final visit to Rosemary’s flat to reclaim several of his belongings. As he opens the door using his spare key, he hopes she is not home. But when he hears rummaging downstairs, he is relieved to find only her housekeeper, Mrs. Harris, sitting alone in the dark. He notices she is drinking a bottle of gin, is heavily intoxicated, and that the rest of the flat is lying in a shocking state of total disrepair. Alarmed, he quickly tries to grab his things but he is confronted by Mrs. Harris who lunges at him, using certain secret phrases he and Rosemary spoke together. He tosses Mrs. Harris into a closet as she screams and he flees from the flat. He assumes Mrs. Harris was spying on them… but later, as he reflects more on this disturbing incident, he notices that Mrs. Harris actually has the same height and breast size as Rosemary, and he realizes that he has never actually seen Mrs. Harris and Rosemary together in the same room. Suddenly, things become shockingly clear to him. Rosemary and Mrs. Harris are one and the same –is Rosemary just acting? Or drunk? Or is she truly disturbed? Does she have multiple personality disorder? Who is the real Rosemary? A friend later informs Fred that Rosemary has been occasionally prone to episodes like this with complete amnesia of the events while she assumes another persona. They visit her flat together one final time, but Edwin forbids Fred from entering since she is in such a distraught state. Fred then catches his flight and returns home to his wife, never getting the chance to goodbye to Rosemary. He realizes that the Rosemary he loved doesn’t really exist after all.
“The climate of their affair had always been, not stormy, but dramatically various, as changeable as the English spring weather –sunshine succeeding showers with a breezy, careless rapidity” (184).
At the same time that Fred learns a dark secret about his beau Rosemary, Vinnie also learns something about Chuck. When Chuck invites Vinnie to spend the rest of the summer with him in Wiltshire, she continually comes up with excuses to stay in London. And Vinnie also learns that her sabbatical grant has not been extended thanks to Leonard Zimmern’s criticism, and one day she receives a surprise telephone call from Fred’s wife Roo. Roo is trying to track down Fred, hoping he will return her calls, and as it turns out, Roo’s father is none other than Leonard Zimmern. Still, despite the connection to Vinnie’s greatest career antagonist, and because Chuck has entered her life and has always encouraged her to do the right thing, Vinnie decides to venture out into the London evening to flag down Fred and tell him to call his wife.
Shortly thereafter, Vinnie tries calling on Chuck but he is suspiciously unresponsive. She wonders if Chuck is angry with her. Days go by and she finally receives another surprise phone call, this time from Chuck’s daughter Barbie Mumpson (another recurring character in Lurie’s novels) who is calling to let her know that Chuck recently died. He collapsed of a heart attack. Apparently, he had been warned about over-exerting himself, he never said anything about it to Vinnie, and now she thinks back to him drinking, smoking, and engaged in other strenuous acts in which he might have died at her flat. She also quickly begins to wonder if she could have saved him if only she had gone to visit him in Wiltshire sooner. At any rate, Barbie arranges to meet Vinnie for tea at her London flat to give her a gift, an image of his ancestor that Chuck had intended to give her. During their conversation, Barbie explains that she spread her father’s ashes on the grotto where he was researching his genealogy and she asks if there was ever any other woman he was involved with in England. Vinnie simply replies that she doesn’t know anything about that, but later (after Barbie leaves) she admits to a friend that she was actually in love with Chuck. She is no longer afraid of admitting her love publicly. In the end, after about five months in London, she has finished her next book on children’s playground rhymes.
“Why does London look so marvelously well today? And why does she feel for the first time that she’s not only seeing it, but is part of it? Something has changed, she thinks. She isn’t the same person she was: she has loved and been loved” (279).
****
I found Foreign Affairs to be an all-around delightful novel about Americans abroad and the stereotypically patrician brand of romance they expect to find in Europe contra the reality of love when Vinnie falls for a man who seems at first glance to be an anti-intellectual folksy Midwestern dunce and Fred accidentally falls for a mentally unstable actress whose appearance as a high-brow lady turns out to be a mere performance. The debt Foreign Affairs owes to Henry James is made quite apparent throughout the novel, even if Foreign Affairs turns James’s typical portrayal of American innocence versus European sophistication on its head. In fact, at one point Henry James is even acknowledged in the text:
“James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier, or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James’ prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was like now… Because, after all, isn’t Rosemary the classic James heroine: beautiful, fine, delicate, fatally impulsive?… Well, isn’t that what he’s here for, the sterling young American champion James himself might have provided? For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel, and again it is dizzying, exhilarating.” (103).
Foreign Affairs is also a wonderful city novel as we are invited to explore the streets of London from Vinnie’s flat on Regent’s Park Road (which she is renting for the third time from an Oxford don), to the lavish theatrical extravaganzas haunted by Fred, Rosemary, and their friends. Alison Lurie draws our attention to architectural, and therefore cultural, contrasts between England and the United States. Whereas the United States is “devastated by billboards, used-car lots, ice storms, and tornadoes” and it is “a nation plagued by sensational and horrible demonstrations and drunken student brawls,” England has folklore and history. Vinnie venerates England, particularly at the start of the novel, even if by the end she is ready to embrace her homeland:
“Many teachers of English, like Vinnie, fall in love with England as well as with her literature. With familiarity, however their infatuation often declined into indifference or even contempt. If they long for her now, it is as she was in the past –most often, in the period of their own specialization: the for the colorful, vital England of Shakespeare’s time, or the lavish elegance and charm of the Edwardian period. With the bitterness of disillusioned lovers, they complain that contemporary Britain is cold, wet, and overpriced; its natives unfriendly; its landscape and even its climate ruined. England is past its prime, they say; she is worn-out and old; and, like most of the old, boring… Vinnie not only disagrees, she secretly pities those of her friends and colleagues who claim to have rejected England, since it is clear to her that in truth England has rejected them. The chill they complain of is a matter of style. Englishmen and Englishwomen do not open their arms and hearts to every casual passerby, just as English lawns do not flow into the lawns next door. Rather they conceal themselves behind high brick walls and dense prickly hedges, turning their coolest and most formal side to strangers. Only those who have been inside know how warm and cozy it can be there” (18).
Alison Lurie taught university-level courses on folklore and children’s literature for many years and so she didn’t need to do much research to fill out Vinnie’s career. When Lurie was younger, she did sometimes travel abroad on English sabbaticals with her first husband which led to her becoming an anglophile of sorts, but, like many of the characters in Foreign Affairs, she was known to grow disillusioned with England’s proclivity for snobbishness and timidity. And this theme of disillusionment is at the heart of Foreign Affairs –things are never quite what they seem on the surface. Like both Vinnie and Fred in the novel, perhaps Alison Lurie also found that her foreign love affair with England was naïve at best when she eventually learned to rediscover her own amor patriae for her home in the United States.
Notable Quotations
“On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog” (3, opening line).
“For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department –indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures, many of them must spout toads and lizards” (6-7).
“…it is a mistake to believe that plain women are more or less celibate. The error is common, since in the popular mind –and especially in the media—the idea of sex is linked with the idea of beauty. Partly as a result, men are not eager to boast of their liaisons with unattractive women, or to display such liaisons in public. As for the women, painful experience and a natural sense of self-preservation often keep them from publicizing these relationships, in which they seldom have the status of a declared lover, though often that of a good friend” (11-12).
“As has sometimes been remarked, almost any woman can find a man to sleep with if she sets her standards low enough. But what must be lowered are not necessarily standards of character, intelligence, sexual energy, good looks, and worldly achievement. Rather, far more often, she must relax her requirements for commitment, constancy, and romantic passion; she must cease to hope for declarations of love, admiring stares, witty telegrams, eloquent letters, birthday cards, valentines, candy, and flowers. No; plain women have a sex life. What they lack, rather, is a love life” (12).
“Boys are allowed to be handsome, as long as that is not their only asset, and Fred was an all-around asset: energetic, outgoing, good at both lessons and games; the sort of child teachers naturally favor” (28).
“…what tourists take home are, typically, snapshots” (32).
“As Edwin once said, social life is like alchemy: mixing foreign elements is dangerous” (62).
“Fred’s handsomeness hadn’t saved his marriage either, Vinnie thinks. That wasn’t so hard to understand, perhaps. Such looks arouse false expectations: the noble exterior is assumed to clothe a mind and soul equally great –the Platonic fallacy” (63).
“As related earlier, Vinnie has throughout her life slept mainly with men whose interest in her was casual and comradely rather than romantic. They seldom used the word ‘love’ to her except in moments of passionate confusion; instead they told her that they were ‘very fond’ of her and that she was great in bed and a real pal” (75).
“But Vinnie has been brought up to believe that though a man may work for wealth or fame, a woman must labor for love –if not that of a husband or children, at least that of a profession” (113).
“Fido’s infidelity astonishes Vinnie. For nearly twenty years of his life in her imagination he has never shown the slightest interest in or even awareness of anyone except her. What does it mean that she should now so vividly picture him following Chuck Mumpson across London, or making sloppy canine love to him? Does it mean, for instance, that she is really sorry for Chuck, perhaps even sorrier than she is for herself? Or are he and she somehow alike? Is there some awful parallel between Chuck’s fantasy of being an English lord and hers of being –in a more subtle metaphysical sense, of course—an English lady? Might there be someone somewhere as impatiently scornful of her pretensions as she is of his?” (129).
“…the contemporary novelist, like an up-to-date fruit-grower, reconstructs the natural landscape, removing most of the aging trees to leave room for young saplings that haven’t yet been grafted or put down deep roots” (200).
“Why, after all, should Vinnie become a minor character in her own life? Why shouldn’t she imagine herself as an explorer standing on the edge of some landscape as yet unmapped by literature: interested, even excited –ready to be surprised?” (200).
“Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is terribly risky business” (205).
The 1985 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1985 Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members:
- Chair: Walter Clemons (1930-1994) was a book critic and writer who was on the staff of Newsweek in the 1970’s and 80’s. He was born in Houston, graduated from high school there. He received an A.B. with highest honors in English from Princeton in 1951 and a master’s degree with first-class honors in English in 1953 from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After Oxford, he went to work as a seaman in the Gulf of Mexico, in offshore seismic exploration. He also worked as a nightclub pianist in New York City and Rome, where he went in 1960 as a recipient of a Prix de Rome. Author of a Volume of Stories. Mr. Clemons was a freelance writer from 1955-65 and was the author of a book of short stories, “The Poison Tree and Other Stories,” that came out in 1959. He was an editor with McGraw-Hill in New York from 1966-68, and an editor and writer with Vanity Fair magazine in 1982 and 1983. He worked with Newsweek from 1971-82 and from 1983-88. In those years, he was an editor, a book critic and a senior writer; he also occasionally wrote criticism of ballet. He wrote a number of cover stories, most of them about authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow and John Cheever. After 1988, he continued to write reviews for the magazine from time to time. He also wrote criticism for The New York Times, where he was an editor of The Book Review from 1968-71, and for other publications. At the time of his death due to diabetes in 1994, he was in the midst of writing a biography on Gore Vidal.
- Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, then went on to Yale University where he received his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude under the direction of Harold Bloom. He taught English at Cornell University (1967-1971), and Northwestern University (1971-1981). He joined the English faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 where he would teach for 16 years. He published several books including The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination, Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature, and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. After arriving in California, McConnell published a series of detective novels about a nun who inherits her father’s investigative agency (Murder Among Friends, Blood Lake, The Front King, and Liar’s Poker). He wrote a regular humorous column in the Catholic journal Commonweal. Upon his death in 1999, the University of California wrote an In Memoriam: “With Frank McConnell’s death on 17 January 1999, the UCSB Department of English lost its most popular undergraduate teacher. With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning–as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.” He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
- Anne Tyler (1941-present) is a novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Breathing Lessons in 1989, and two of her other novels were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Click here for a full biography of Anne Tyler in my review of Breathing Lessons.
In the 1985 jury report which was sent to Robert Christopher, jury chair Walter Clemons wrote of three works to nominate for the prize in “alphabetical order.” Perhaps the jury chose to offer their choices in “alphabetical order” rather than via a traditional ranking system, in order to avoid the controversial board denials of top jury selections in recent years.
- Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie: a “witty comedy takes up what Henry James liked to call ‘the international theme’ –the impact of European civilization on its American visitors. Ms. Lurie’s sharp observation of Americans in love in London is a fresh look at the uneasy love affair between England and America.”
- I Wish This War Were Over by Diana O’Hehir: “Meticulous characterization and an inspired sense of time and place distinguish this novel set in World War II America. The characters are complex and endearing, and the year 1944 is recreated with vivid precision.”
- Leaving the Land by Douglas Unger: “This first novel treats a painful contemporary subject, the squeezing out of existence of small farmers, whose way of life is made obsolete during the book’s 30-year span by the takeover of agribusiness. Unger is perceptive and unsentimental about a harsh moment in our history.”
Also, two judges (I am unsure of which two) strongly supported Lincoln by Gore Vidal as the top contender and they asked that it be given honorable mention in the jury report.
Who is Alison Lurie?
Alison Stewart Lurie (1926-2020) was born on September 3, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois but was raised in White Plains, New York. Due to complications with forceps during delivery, she was born “deaf in one badly damaged ear,” as she wrote in 1982 in an autobiographical essay for The New York Times Book Review, “and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer.” Her father Harry Lawrence Lurie was a Latvian-born sociologist (he later became the first executive director of the National Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds), and her mother Bernice Lurie (née Stewart) was a Scotland-born journalist and book critic.
She attended a boarding school in Darien, Connecticut and graduated from Radcliffe College (of Harvard University) in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature.
After a spell as a reader for the New York office of the Oxford University Press, she met Jonathan Peale Bishop, an academic, while in college and they were married in 1948. They had three songs together (John, Jeremy and Joshua) and while raising the children, Alison followed her husband’s academic career around the country from Harvard, to Amherst College, and later to UCLA, before eventually settling at Cornell University in 1961.
During this period, Alison Lurie began writing. After two early rejections (and the strident efforts of her husband and friends to persuade her to drop the enterprise altogether and spend more time on her family), Lurie’s first published novel, Love and Friendship, appeared in 1962. It was set in the imaginary New England town of Convers (a fictionalized Amherst), and it apparently portrayed chauvinistic faculty members amidst a claustrophobic small-town academic community. Later, in Lurie’s novella Real People (1969), she created the writers’ colony Illyria which was based on the actual retreat of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, where Lurie spent time writing her second and third novels (though her presence apparently caused great offense). At the end of the 1960s, Lurie took a teaching post at Cornell (which became her model for the fictional school of “Corinth” which appears in The War Between the Tates, Foreign Affairs, and Truth and Consequences). After serving for years as a struggling female lecturer, in 1976 she was finally made an F. J. Whiton professor of American literature. Her specialty was children’s literature and folk-tale collections, though her fictional works also explored anthropological themes of symbolic fashion, especially in one of her other major works The War Between the Tates (1974), a novel about Brian Tate, a professor of political science, who has midlife crisis of sorts amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War and has an affair with a psychology graduate student. She later published a nonfiction book, The Language of Clothes, about the semiotics of dress in the tradition of Roland Barthes.
She divorced her husband in 1984 and then married the writer, Edward Hower. She spent part of her time in Hampstead, London; Ithaca, New York; and Key West, Florida.
Her 11 mordant novels are known for their dry wit and are often filled with recurring characters like the acerbic literary critic Leonard Zimmern. Her works have often been called satires of marriage and manners, and they have ben frequently compared to the works of Jane Austen. Gore Vidal dubbed her “the Queen Herod of modern fiction” (a description Lurie herself despised) in particular for her portrayal of the Tate family in The War Between the Tates. And since she often poked fun at various sacred cows in American culture, such as feminism 9which was experiencing a now infamously exclusionary brand in the 1970s), she was sometimes accused of being an anti-feminist, a label she outrightly rejected. “I consider myself a feminist and not a separatist,” she once told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1994.
Alison Lurie died of natural causes in Ithaca, New York on December 3, 2020, at the age of 94. Her personal papers are archived at Cornell University.
In the New York Times obituary for Alison Lurie, she was called a “Tart-Voiced Novelist of Manners” whose oeuvre was rife with “novels that were small morality plays, characters (educated, often self-regarding men and women) couple, have buyer’s remorse and recouple with new partners, often with disastrous consequences, in a ceaseless recombinant two-step.” And the Times noted that “Ms. Lurie’s novels were often called comedies of manners, but perhaps it is more apt to call them comedies of mortification –’mortification’ in the sense of both social embarrassment and the inevitable slouch toward decay.” Throughout her career she won numerous accolades including a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, in addition to awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and honorary degrees from Oxford University and the University of Nottingham.
Film Adaptations
- Foreign Affairs (1993), a made-for-television movie
- Director: Jim O’Brien
- Starring: Joanne Woodward, Brian Dennehy, Eric Stoltz
Further Reading
- The War Between the Tates (1974)
Literary Context 1984-1985
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1984): Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) “for his poetry, which endowed with freshness, and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man.”
- National Book Award Winner (1984): Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories by Ellen Gilchrist.
- Note: Since 1984, the National Book Awards have been presented in the fall, usually November, for books published roughly during the calendar year (December of the previous year through November). The Booker Prize made a similar change in 1971 (the Booker is also typically awarded in November).
- Booker Prize Winner (1984): Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1984 was The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Other notable bestsellers that year were: The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum, The Sicilian by Mario Puzo, The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss, and Lincoln by Gore Vidal.
- In 1984, Tennessee public schools removed Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck from its stacks.
- Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard was published.
- The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy was published.
- Democracy by Joan Didion was published.
- Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich was published.
- Neuromancer by William Gibson was published.
- Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert was published.
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was published.
- Slow Learner: Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon was published.
- The Big U by Neal Stephenson was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
This was my first Alison Lurie novel and she strikes me as a charming, clever, trenchant, and chucklingly funny writer who rightly drew the attention of literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s. But tragically her reputation seems to have fallen by the wayside in more recent years (as far as I can tell) and that is unfortunate indeed. Foreign Affairs is a neatly organized, poignant exploration of America’s academic love affair with foreign places and high-brow people, only to discover that, once the veil is lifted, things are not always what they seem. Sometimes disillusionment is a good and necessary experience. I will rank Foreign Affairs among those lesser-known treasures of the Pulitzer Prize-winners.
Lurie, Alison. Foreign Affairs. Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, NY, 2006 (originally published in 1984). She dedicated the book to American novelist, essayist, and satirist Diane Johnson.