From The Guardian: Alison Lurie, novelist known for satires of marriage and manners, has died… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
Few writers have shown such a commitment to their characters as the US novelist Alison Lurie, who has died aged 94. Her 11 works of domestic and academic black comedy are peopled with an interconnecting cast, who move from the sidelines to centre stage, often reassessed and redeemed on second appearance, sometimes transferred from childhood to adulthood.
Lurie’s most consistent character is the acerbic literary critic Leonard Zimmern, who pops up to extol the virtues of the single life in The War Between the Tates (1974), attack the study of children’s literature (his creator’s own specialism) in the Pulitzer-prize-winning Foreign Affairs (1984), undermine the theories of the feminist biographer in The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988), laugh at nature writers in The Last Resort (1998) and expose the pitfalls of early literary success in Truth and Consequences (2005).
Lurie accounted for his nearly ubiquitous presence by explaining that Zimmern was the hero of her first, rejected novel and so, sorry that he could not have a book of his own, she brought him back in a series of supporting roles. But his habit of revealing the self-delusion of others suggests that he functions as her alter ego, always ready with a pin to prick pretensions, much as Lurie was herself.
She began to write, she said, to amuse herself and other people, but described her inspiration as the desire to laugh at things. Often compared to the work of Jane Austen, Lurie’s satires of marriage and manners have a savage quality. Gore Vidal dubbed her “the Queen Herod of modern fiction” (a description Lurie herself disliked) for her portrayal of the Tates’ revolting adolescent children in The War Between the Tates; but the most shocking moment in the book is when the narrator comments, of the put-upon wife and mother Erica: “The fact that she hates her own children is her darkest, most carefully guarded secret.”
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