Lurie’s published novels:
- Love and Friendship (1962). Emmy Stockwell Turner and Miranda Fenn, two faculty wives at the all-male elite and isolated Convers College, juggle their love and friendship for their husbands and for a womanizing composer.
- The Nowhere City (1965). Paul Cattleman, history grad student, moves to L.A. to work for the military-industrial complex and finds that neither the company nor his beatnik mistress have a sense of history; he returns to Harvard. His wife however, with the help of a womanizing psychiatrist, frees herself from disabling fears and decides to stay.
- Imaginary Friends (1967). Roger Zimmern, a young sociology professor at an upstate New York university (Corinth), helps a senior professor investigate a group of small-town individuals who are receiving messages from Ro of the planet Varna.
- Real People (1969). The writer Janet Belle Smith, wife of Clark Stockwell II, spends a summer at Illyria, an artist’s colony, along with assorted poets, artists, musicians, and the critic Leonard Zimmern. In sorting out her platonic from her sexual love affairs, she realizes she needs to write about Illyria, even though that means she can never return there.
- The War Between the Tates (1974). See separate article. Features Leonard Zimmern with his wife Danielle and daughters Ruth and Celia; set at Corinth University in 1969-70.
- Only Children (1979). In 1936, nine-year-old Mary Ann Hubbard (Miranda Fenn) and Lolly Zimmern (Lorin Jones), along with Lolly’s teenaged half-brother Leonard, spend a Fourth of July in the country with their parents and a teacher. The parents flirt and contemplate adultery while the children learn what they can about themselves and the world.
- Foreign Affairs (1984); Pulitzer Prize. See separate article. Fred Stockwell Turner marries Ruth March (Zimmern). Vinnie Miner meets Chuck Mumpson and his daughter Barbie.
- The Truth About Lorin Jones (1989); Prix Femina Étranger. Polly Alter, divorced with a teenage son and attracted to a group of lesbians, is trying to write the story of the long-dead artist Lorin Jones. Was she a victim whose painting suffered from a series of overbearing men in her life, or an opportunist who exploited men to further her painting? Polly studies the New York art scene, New England elite college friends and teachers, Zimmern relatives, the ex-husband at Cape Cod, and the ex-lover in Key West.
- The Last Resort (1998). The naturalist Wilkie Walker allows his wife Jenny to remove him from Convers College to Key West, with the idea that the latter place might be favorable for suicide. Jenny on the other hand hopes he will continue to work on his books, on which she quietly collaborates. Jenny finds love with Lee Weiss (a Zimmern cousin) at Artemis Lodge, and Wilkie decides he might as well live. Barbie and Myra Mumpson are concerned about Myra’s gay nephew.
- Truth and Consequences (2006). Corinth University architecture professor Alan MacKenzie hurts his back at a department picnic and life changes for him and his wife Jane. They get some help from Bernie Kotelchuck and his wife Danielle (formerly Zimmern). After a period of balancing giving and receiving care, they find new loves in the visiting authoress Delia Delaney and her husband. Under Delia’s influence, Alan becomes an artist.
Lurie has also published a book of short stories,
Women and Ghosts. This collection of nine (or ten) tales presents kindly or maleficent spirits inhabiting places or objects with which the heroines come into contact. Among the characters who narrate or figure in the stories are Ruth and Celia Zimmern, Gary Mumpson, Janet Belle Smith and assorted Stockwells, and Miranda Fenn. Miranda’s son Charles marries Celia, Leonard Zimmern’s daughter, in the story “In the Shadow.” The daughter of the beatnik (proto-hippie) Tylers of “Nowhere City” has married Clark Stockwell III, Janet’s son, in “Waiting for the Baby.”
Themes and Characters
Lurie’s novels, with their light touch and focus on portraying the emotions of well-educated adulterers, bear more resemblance to some 20th-century British authors, e.g. (Kingsley Amis, David Lodge) than to the big American authors of her generation. Her titles and the saga-like intertwining of her characters suggest high ambitions.
Love and Friendship, the title of her first published novel, is shared with an early novel by Jane Austen; it takes on the problem of the American college as initiation rite into manhood, and the awkwardness of the role therein assigned to women. The next title,
The Nowhere City, evokes both Thomas More’s
Utopia (Greek for “nowhere”) and Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, California, “There is no there there.” Utopias are the subject of
Imaginary Friends and
Real People: the small group of spiritualists examined by a sociologist and the small group of artists examined by a writer.
The War between the Tates and
Foreign Affairs imply by their titles parallels between academic adulteries and political upheavals.
The Truth about Lorin Jones and
Truth and Consequences take us back to the problem of truth-telling, both in life and in art.
A number of Lurie's characters are, like her, born in 1926, give or take a few years: Lorin Jones and Mary Ann/Miranda Fenn, Janet Belle Smith (42 in
Real People, 1969), Erica Tate (40 in 1969 and like Lurie a Radcliffe B.A.), Vinnie Miner (54 in
Foreign Affairs, 1978, and like Lurie a professor of children’s literature), and Wilkie Walker (70 in
Last Resort, 1998). Since these characters have also followed Lurie from Amherst/Convers to Los Angeles to Cornell/Corinth and to London and Key West, inevitably one considers the possibility that some at least of these characters represent the author herself. Janet Belle Smith (
Real People) and Delia Delaney (
Truth and Consequences) are rather pretentious writers of whom Lurie makes fun some of the time, but they also reflect aspects of her experience as a writer.
Adaptations
- The War Between the Tates was adapted as a television movie for NBC in 1977. It starred Elizabeth Ashley and Richard Crenna.
- Imaginary Friends was adapted as a Thames Television series in 1987. Evidently the setting was moved from upstate New York to the English coast.
- Foreign Affairs was adapted as a television movie in 1993, starring Joanne Woodward, Brian Dennehy, and Eric Stoltz.
