Fiction: Even the most smugly intact complacency is vulnerable to attack as Pulitzer Prize winner Alison Lurie sets out to demonstrate in her engaging and lightweight but cautionary novel, Truth and Consequences. Her thesis in this her 10th novel appears to be the way two people involved in the same marriage may not really know each other all that well, writes Eileen Battersby.
Set in that all too savage world of sheltered academic life where the learned and privileged hover like sharks, it is a story of a marriage that collapses under the stress of real-life problems and the distractions of new options.
Thus weakened, any alliance, particularly one created by two ordinary people unskilled in the art of survival, quickly faces disaster. Jane and Alan live in a charming 150-year-old New England farmhouse and share a calm existence structured around a low-key university.
Alan, an artist, is working as an archecturial historian, while his capable, hard-working wife, Jane, is a college administrator, entrusted with keeping the practical side of college life going. All was well until that day some 18 months earlier, when Alan, suddenly no longer young, but playing volleyball with his graduate students, skids and falls badly. The injury refuses to heal.
As the story opens, Jane is trying to figure out exactly who the broken wreck lying on the sofa is, and then remembers, it is Alan, the man who used to be her husband. "I'm tired and worried and no fun for anybody, including myself, she thinks. In a way we're not really husband and wife anymore. We're housekeeper and employer. Or maybe, in the language of a blandly instructive pamphlet she had read while waiting for Alan in some doctor's office, caregiver and caregetter."
What had seemed to be the simplest of accidents develops into crisis. Alan preoccupied by constipation and the whereabouts of his pills and next glass of grapefruit juice, has retreated into self pity, leaving Jane to concentrate on the role of martyred slave. Aside from tending her whinging spouse, and weary of being wonderful to Alan, she must also see to the maintenance of the college. There is also the tedious business of attracting visiting professors to the campus. Once lured, such academic superstars and celebrity intellectuals must be housed, entertained and aware of the privileges they enjoy as guests.
Lurie describes the rules, as it were, by which the small community under her scrutiny arrange their lives. It is well delineated; poised and witty and sufficiently barbed without being nasty. It is a world with which Lurie is well acquainted through her other career as a professor of American Literature at Cornell University. She is also an internationally respected authority on children's literature. The tone of this book is sub-Updike, probably because Lurie is detached; too amused by her characters to become overly involved and too intent on fun to aspire after much profundity.
Because of this approach, Truth and Consequences never aspires to become a morality play and instead settles neatly into a domestic comedy of double deception heightened by moments of exasperation.
Alan and Jane are pitted against, and with, two characters who have long since discovered the reality of life as a battle of wits in which the only rule is that of pleasing oneself. Lurie, the least affected of writers, always maintains a tight leash on language - she will describe, but she never eulogises. If there is excess, it is only in the cause of comedy.
Prim, slightly old-fashioned yet believable, Jane knows all about guilt. In her, Lurie has crafted Everywoman, comfortable, happy in her relationship and job and at 40, still healthy and good looking enough to feel safe in her skin. Although her patience is dissolving, she remains almost loyal enough to Alan to lie about his well being. Yet she feels guilty, lying does not come that easily to her.
Meanwhile, Alan moans and groans. Into all this misery comes Delia Delay, writer and dangerous Southern belle type who possesses fabulous, almost ridiculous fairy-tale beauty. Her convenient migraines and ruthless ability to get her own way make her the sort of rival any wife would fear. Delia also has a husband, affable Henry, whose function is largely that of ensuring Delia never has to make the same request twice.
It is all quite funny - and very predictable. It succeeds through the dialogue, which frequently rings true. Still, this is not the Lurie of The War Between the Tates (1974), Foreign Affairs (1984) or The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988); this is Lurie having fun in a way rather similar to the zany route taken by Muriel Spark in her recent comic skit, The Finishing School.
Truth and Consequences is a caper; Alan finds a fulfilment of sorts through his adventure with Delia, if not quite the version he had planned on.
As for Delia, described by one of the characters as "the intellectual's Dolly Parton", she could have written the book. However extreme she is, Delia, beautiful if ageing behind the lace and make-up, is shrewd and remains interesting. Lurie supplies her with a generous share of one-liners and vicious observations. When Jane, although sinning herself, discovers Alan's betrayal, she marches home to Mother. Alan, new to the world of deception, is surprised when Delia laughs at Jane's revolt and, despite being besotted by his exotic siren asks: "So where should she have gone?"
The reply is perfectly pitched. " 'Jesus, I don't know,' Delia sighed, almost yawned. 'New York, Paris? But some people have no imagination.' That's true, he thought. But it's not their fault; and if Jane had really gone to New York or Paris there would be confusion and scandal."
Lurie's tale of somewhat silly people in search of something, anything, is told with sufficient humour and lightness of touch to amuse, without ever approaching vintage Lurie.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times.
Truth and Consequences. By Alison Lurie, Chatto, 232pp, £15.99