Alison Lurie’s novel Foreign Affairs looks back a bit at the novels of manners written
by Henry James as its inspiration, as she sets two faculty members from her fictitious college Corinth University (a flimsy dressing
thrown over the real Cornell University, where Lurie taught for years) in
England in the late eighties.
As such, the reader can expect the typical inspection
of each culture’s faults and strengths.
Lurie is in full command at the craft of novel writing, so this
exercise never sinks into banality or cliche. She knows how to see the unusual in the usual, and set it all down in surprising and lively prose.
Lurie is very adept at following the tangles of
human relationships; their interactions, interrelations and disjunctures. This is very much the case with this novel, but
with an added element. Lurie takes a
novel of social steps and missteps and creates a deep mediation on what it
means to be in love and loved, alone and social. In all, what is means to be human.
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