Alison Lurie obituary
Few writers have shown such a commitment to their characters as the US novelist Alison Lurie, who has died aged 94. Her 11 works of domestic and academic black comedy are peopled with an interconnecting cast, who move from the sidelines to centre stage, often reassessed and redeemed on second appearance, sometimes transferred from childhood to adulthood.
Lurie’s most consistent character is the acerbic literary critic Leonard Zimmern, who pops up to extol the virtues of the single life in The War Between the Tates (1974), attack the study of children’s literature (his creator’s own specialism) in the Pulitzer-prize-winning Foreign Affairs (1984), undermine the theories of the feminist biographer in The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988), laugh at nature writers in The Last Resort (1998) and expose the pitfalls of early literary success in Truth and Consequences (2005).
Lurie accounted for his nearly ubiquitous presence by explaining that Zimmern was the hero of her first, rejected novel and so, sorry that he could not have a book of his own, she brought him back in a series of supporting roles. But his habit of revealing the self-delusion of others suggests that he functions as her alter ego, always ready with a pin to prick pretensions, much as Lurie was herself.
She began to write, she said, to amuse herself and other people, but described her inspiration as the desire to laugh at things. Often compared to the work of Jane Austen, Lurie’s satires of marriage and manners have a savage quality. Gore Vidal dubbed her “the Queen Herod of modern fiction” (a description Lurie herself disliked) for her portrayal of the Tates’ revolting adolescent children in The War Between the Tates; but the most shocking moment in the book is when the narrator comments, of the put-upon wife and mother Erica: “The fact that she hates her own children is her darkest, most carefully guarded secret.”
Taking the Vietnam war as a metaphor for marital crisis, this is one of her funniest novels, if also her bleakest, with its details of lawyers who privately decide whose divorce to delay on the grounds of likely reconciliation and whose to speed up; there is also its devastating closing comment on the Tates: “They will forget that they are ugly, foolish, guilty and dying.”
Elsewhere, political correctness, feminist dogma and sociology all come under the dissecting knife. Each critique is balanced by a more positive perception, however, either within one novel or between novels. Thus the caricatured lesbians of The Truth About Lorin Jones are answered by the sympathetic portrayal of Lee and Jenny in The Last Resort. Always keen to reflect on the zeitgeist (ecology in The Last Resort, new age sects in the 1967 novel Imaginary Friends), Lurie is nothing if not scrupulously fair.
She was born in Chicago, the elder daughter of socialist parents, Bernice (nee Stewart), a journalist, and Harry Lurie, a sociologist, grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1946. After a spell as a reader for the New York office of the Oxford University Press, she married Jonathan Bishop, an academic, in 1948 and followed his fledgling career, moving to Harvard, Amherst College and later UCLA before they settled at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, in 1961. Lurie’s three sons were born during this period and her first serious attempts at writing (she was a member of the Poets’ Theatre group at Harvard, along with John Ashbery, James Merrill and Frank O’Hara) date from then.
After two early rejections (and the efforts of her husband and friends to persuade her to drop the enterprise 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 fictionalised Amherst), and its picture of chauvinistic faculty members and the claustrophobia of small-town academic life was an early indication of Lurie’s tendency to use facets of her own experience in her fiction. Other examples are her use of Los Angeles in The Nowhere City (1965), of London in Foreign Affairs, and of Florida in The Last Resort, all locations in which Lurie habitually spent part of each year.
Best known is her creation of the precious writers’ colony Illyria and its control-freak owner in the novella Real People (1969). This was based on the actual retreat of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, where Lurie spent time on her second and third novels. It caused such offence that she did not feel able to return there.
At the end of the 1960s, Lurie took a teaching post at Cornell (the model for the fictional Corinth of The War Between the Tates, Foreign Affairs and Truth and Consequences). Remarking later on the difficulties facing female academics, she noted: “It took me four novels to get a job teaching one course at the lowest possible level.” Initially a lecturer, in 1976 she was made Whiton professor of American literature.
Her specialism was children’s literature, and she published a number of folk-tale collections, a novel written from a child’s perspective (Only Children, 1979) and two collections of essays, Not in Front of the Grown-Ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003). Criticised by some as overly simplistic in their approach, they nonetheless raised the profile of the subject.
Lurie’s most enjoyable work of non-fiction is her astute explanation of costume and its meaning, The Language of Clothes (1981). Although her interest in clothing is clear from her fiction (Vinnie and Chuck’s apparel takes on symbolic value in the self-consciously stylish Foreign Affairs, the hippy fashions of the students in The War Between the Tates are drawn with sociological detail, the very different values of Delia and Jane are evident from their clothes in Truth and Consequences), this exploration of the history of communication through what we choose to wear (or manners dictate we must wear) was a surprise. It is an accessible and witty introduction to the subject. The Language of Houses (2014) takes the same lens to architectural design.
One of the few writers who successfully combined careers as novelist and academic, and popular on both sides of the Atlantic, Lurie once described her work as using an English literary style to explore American situations. But with her self-doubting heroines and chauvinist husbands, romantic catastrophes and career embarrassments, her drily funny work is much more universal than that would suggest.
Lurie’s first marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by her second husband, the novelist and academic Edward Hower, whom she married in 1995, her three sons, John, Jeremy and Joshua, and three grandchildren, and her sister, Jennifer.
• Alison Lurie, novelist and academic, born 3 September 1926; died 3 December 2020
