Title: Alison Lurie
First published: 1992
Description: "Praised for her wit, psychological insight, and incisive assessment of the complexities of modern life, Alison Lurie has been hailed as the contemporary counterpart of both Jane Austen and Henry James. In such novels as The War between the Tates and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs, Lurie has plied her elegant prose style to explore the dynamics of marriage, loneliness, self-delusion, and self-discovery with a vivid awareness of the surrounding social climate--be it the tumultuousness of the 1960s or the self-absorption of the 1980s." "Richard Hauer Costa's Alison Lurie is the first book-length study to appraise Lurie's major works of adult fiction and nonfiction. Beginning with her memoir of poet and playwright V.R. Lang, first published in 1959, Costa traces the evolution of Lurie's writings as she expands the boundaries of her imaginative and intellectual territories while retaining her capacity to investigate them with a relentless, unflinching pursuit of the truth."

"Nowhere is this pursuit more evident than in Lurie's fiction or better expressed than by the protagonist of her most recent novel, The Truth about Lorin Jones, whose goal it is "to write a book that would tell the whole contusing contradictory truth ... let the devil take the hindmost." Nearly all of Lurie's protagonists are women, and Costa takes as one of his major themes the author's desire to unmask them. In a process of liberation often catalyzed by a passionate sexual relationship, each woman's true character is exposed as Lurie leads her to genuine self-knowledge, something that, Costa argues, Lurie values above all else and at almost any cost. Costa links the themes of Lurie's major nonfiction works, The Language of Clothes and Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature, with her fiction. The ideas in The Language of Clothes, a study of the conscious and unconscious use of clothing as a means of self-expression, inform many of Lurie's novels, he writes, where dress often "sends out an unspoken signal from one character to another." The sentiment of Don't Tell the Grown-ups, in which Lurie praises those children's books that "express ideas and emotions not generally approved of" and that "view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness," is in good keeping with the satirical sensibility conveyed in Lurie's novels. Lurie's impatience with artifice and self-deception, Costa writes, is evident throughout her work." "Alison Lurie also includes an overview of the critical assessment of Lurie's writings, and Costa addresses the viewpoints of both detractors and admirers. Critics have been unanimous, however, in their appreciation for Lurie's lucid prose style and her acute powers of observation. She is among the most gifted American novelists writing today."--Jacket.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation
People: Alison Lurie
LC classification: PS3562.U7 Z63 1992