Alison Lurie

Scenes from a marriage unfold amid academic rivalries and campus politics.
By Jonathan Yardley

Washington Post. Sunday, October 16, 2005;

So it goes in the groves of academe as envisioned by Alison Lurie, who has made a career out of writing satirical novels about love and its discontents among the professoriat. The best of these, /The War Between the Tates/ (1974), nicely impales its academics against the background of the 1960s counterculture, and /Foreign Affairs/ (1984) does the same against the background of Anglo-American rivalries and tensions. Still, by contrast with the most rapier-like American practitioners of the academic novel, Randall Jarrell and Mary McCarthy, Lurie tends toward a kinder view of her professors and administrators, perhaps because she has spent the past three and a half decades teaching literature and other subjects at Cornell, where she is now professor emerita. She is both of the academic establishment and apart from it, and her tightrope-walking act is often apparent in her fiction


/Truth and Consequences/ is a case in point.(...)

Still, the novel moves along briskly. Jane is 40, Alan about a dozen years older. She is the administrative director of Corinth University's Matthew Unger Center for the Humanities (MUCH), "an endowed facility for visiting scholars and artists housed in a handsome Victorian mansion just off campus." Alan is a fellow in history at the center, with a specialty in 18th-century architecture; he has an endowed chair at the university but has been shuffled off to MUCH in the hope that it will place less strain on his back, since he will "have peace and quiet and no stairs to climb."