Alison Lurie Biography

Alison Lurie (Bishop) was born in Chicago on 3 September 1926. She received the A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1947 and the following year married Jonathan Peale Bishop, Jr. They have three sons. She was the recipient of Yaddo Foundation Fellowships in 1963, 1964, and 1965, the year she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to being a housewife, she has also worked as a ghost writer and librarian. In 1968 she joined the English faculty at Cornell University, where her husband is a professor of English; she currently holds the rank of associate professor, teaching courses in narrative writing and children's literature. Her first work of fiction was published in 1962, and since then she has enjoyed a steadily increasing critical reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Her association with institutions of higher learning has profoundly influenced her writings, for both her experiences and her observations as an undergraduate and a faculty member have given her a great deal of the raw material which she has used in her novels and has combined with an intimate knowledge of life in the Eastern United States, where she has lived all her life. Lurie is, moreover, a highly intelligent writer, perhaps too intelligent for popular tastes since much of her satire is of a cerebral sort aimed at persons in academic life, especially those in small, prestigious colleges. Despite the lucid nature of her fiction, however, it is difficult to say precisely what course Lurie would have her characters take--one is left wondering if events have changed the characters for better or for worse.

As an observer of human events, Lurie is profoundly conservative, even pessimistic. Her environments are normally hermetic and her characters generally well educated and sophisticated by society's standards. Their isolation, breeding, and sophistication rarely save them, however, and will most likely lead to disaster. The underpinnings of society provide little support to her characters, who bumble and mumble their ways through lives in which everything that is right goes wrong and much of what seems wrong just gets worse. Even when, as in The Nowhere City, the values of Eastern America are mixed with the social and moral insouciance of California, the ensuing mayhem provokes the inevitable conclusion that from sea to shining sea some great American dreams are rapidly becoming night sweats.

It is the sacrosanct things in American life that Lurie exposes--college, intelligence, culture, marriage, breeding, The Children (Lurie's emphasis), all the things that one has been taught are necessary, good, and desirable. Gazing piercingly through the pretensions of America, Lurie demonstrates how these ideals and institutions have become fetters, although it is difficult to say what, if anything, would be preferable. Aberrations such as mysticism clearly have their flaws; however, commonly accepted pursuits--history, sociology, English--have defects just as monstrous, if not worse, because they are widely accepted as desirable. Thus, in Imaginary Friends, a famous sociologist becomes deluded by the cult he is studying; however, the "science" of sociology seems to have set the trap which the Truth-Seekers simply spring on the hapless McCann.

Adultery is a recurrent theme in Lurie's work, figuring prominently in every novel except Imaginary Friends. This pernicious disease of the American marriage runs an unpredictable course, however, and Lurie prevents this common occurrence from becoming hackneyed or staid. In The Nowhere City, Katherine's gradual absorption into California life is helped along by frequent illicit intercourse, but she is clearly no worse off at the end of the novel than at its beginning. In her case, the Eastern values, which hold adultery taboo, have been the cause of grief. Her husband gets a broken heart for his sexual calisthenics with a young, shoplifting hippie, but is really no worse for wear. The marriage is not broken up by the adultery, but rather by Katherine's adoption of a life-style in which adultery is only a small part. Conversely, The War Between the Tates is fought on several boudoir battlefields, but the marriage is eventually resumed. In any case, adultery has mixed effects and the outcome of such a relationship is unpredictable, contrary to conventional wisdom that adultery is always bad.

Lurie uses a variety of techniques to convey the satiric spirit of her work. Her use of names with double entendres often provides clues to the viewpoint one should adopt on certain characters and institutions, although the technique is applied at random. In Love and Friendship, the main character is Emily Stockwell Turner, who, though from good American stock, is hardly well; her husband, Holman, is hardly a "whole man," either. In The Nowhere City, Paul Cattleman writes history for a secretive company named Nutting; in Imaginary Friends, the Truth-Seekers are located in a town named Sophis; and all is not idyllic in Illyria, the setting of Real People. Finally, in The War Between the Tates, Erica Tate attempts an affair with an impotent mystic of dubious integrity who has chosen for himself the name Zed (British pronunciation for the last letter of the alphabet) in preference to his real name, Sandy Finkelstein, as if the distinction were of great importance in his case.

Lurie conscientiously avoids moralizing and sermonizing in her novels, a stance reinforced by her prose style, the clarity and lucidity of which keep a rigid curtain between the characters and the author, thereby preventing any significant intrusion of the author upon her material. Her style is precise and dispassionate. Lurie is not, however, the slave of her words; they are carefully controlled. But such distance is not without its difficulties, for one is sometimes tempted to view the characters as impossibly unreal. As John Leonard in the New Republic remarks on The War Between the Tates, Lurie "refuses to be sympathetic, and so this marvelously polished, splendidly crafted novel creates an antiseptic space in the mind: no one can live there." Perhaps the characters in Lurie's novels do live in their own little worlds, but the force of Lurie's style and intellect makes them live, and it is difficult to doubt their veracity.

Real People (1969) is a radical departure from Lurie's other novels. Cast in the form of a journal, it is the story of Janet Belle Smith's week-long stay at an artists' retreat, Illyria. The viewpoint of the novel is thus shifted to that of Janet, and the spectrum of experiences is seen through her prism. The novel at first appears to be about Lurie's maturation, but she is obviously too sophisticated to be identified with Janet, who is, in fact, just the sort of writer Lurie most likely despises--one who has retreated from the calling of a writer by avoiding everything that is not "nice" both in her life and in her work. The novel, which had a lukewarm reception, has often been misunderstood, for it is satire of the most corrosive sort on writers who have a lot of growing up to do. The novel is about how not to be a writer, and Janet is as decadent as the gaudy furnishings of Illyria. Upon Janet's departure, her view of her work has been altered for the better (perhaps, in part, because of her affair with a resident junk sculptor), but here Lurie draws the curtain, though permitting one to speculate that a novelist might do well to imitate her in some small way.

Lurie's subject is the American middle class, especially its women, who figure prominently in every novel. Inasmuch as this class is the backbone and brains of America, its sickness is that of the country. Although several of the main characters are in their twenties, Lurie's work is especially valuable for its studies of those in middle age, those of her own generation, with which The War Between the Tates deals. Profoundly disturbed by what she sees around her, Lurie warns us that much is in need of examination and correction and that much of what shocks us should come as no surprise at all. Blind devotion to outmoded norms of behavior and unthinking dabbling in experimental living can be equally bad. Lurie reminds us that what is to be desired is true mental agility and perspective, not the pseudo-intellectualism and false respectability that often pass for them.