SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “A Grudge against Men.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4964 (22 May 1998): 8.

In the following review, Annan finds shortcomings in The Last Resort's treatment of feminism and love.

Alison Lurie's novels add up to an American Dance to the Music of Time, with the music modulating into a minor feminist key. As in Anthony Powell's sequence, characters from the earlier novels turn up again in later ones. But this is a smaller world. Everyone in it—except for deliberately dissonant outsiders—is an artist, writer, academic, or married to one. They are anchored either in New York or in East Coast Universities called Corinth or Convers, not unlike Cornell, where Lurie is Professor of American Literature. In her fourth novel, Real People (1969), a selection of her regulars are on view at a writers' retreat called Illyria. Writers and artists can escape to this beautiful country estate for...