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Customer Reviews of Foreign Affairs

Witty, poignant and charming...Lurie writes like a dream
Alison Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" is quite the most witty, poignant and charming book I have read all year. Lurie had me in her spell right from the opening chapter where I was struck by her sureness of touch and intuitive understanding of the workings of the human heart. Her sense of humour is so honest and spot-on it's uncanny. She had me in stitches no sooner than Vinnie Miner boarded the plane and found to her dismay the unlikeliest of travelling companions seated next to her and determined to make conversation. Lurie's protagonists, Vinnie Miner and Fred Turner, are both living, breathing individuals everyone recognises. They aren't "types" but real people, not particularly distinguished or virtuous, with insecurities, but nevertheless people you feel compassion for. Vinnie and Fred are thrown together, sharing the same broad social milieu and developing romantic attachments with the unlikeliest of liasons. Of the two, Vinnie's story is by far the more convincing and successful. It is also heartwarming and touching. In contrast, Fred's liason is a little bland and one dimensional but saved by a dark twist at the end which I won't give away. "Foreign Affairs" has to be Lurie's masterpiece. It is a truly delightful and exceptional literary achievement by a novelist whose trademark is a graceful old school charm that's so rare to find these days. It richly deserves its Pulitzer Prize winning status and I would recommend it to anyone who reads to be moved and entertained.

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A masterpiece about England and America
I recently re-read Foreign Affairs, and having adored it twelve years ago was amazed at how delightful, clever and funny it still is. Two American academics, the plain, wryly self-pitying Vinnie, and handsome young Fred, are both English teachers on sabbatical from Corinth University in London. Vinnie loves England, which she conflates with her love of children's classics, and a sort of prim moral and social superiority. Sitting next to an ignorant Mid-Westerner, Chuck, she disdains him pretty much as Lurie's readers would, too, only to be gradually captivated by his underlying good qualities.
Fred, too, finds his miserable experience of London transformed by an affair with a titled actress, who despite her refined charms (the complete opposite to those of his estranged Jewish wife, Ruth) turns out to be less wholesome than perceived. As with all Lurie's novels, the characters in it are interlinked to those in previous books (Ruth is Ruth Zimmern, whom some may remember from Only Children). The allusions to Henry James are done with grace, but what really impresses is the wit and perfection of style Lurie brings to her subject of American innocence and British corruption. For British readers it's wonderfully refreshing to see ourselves through such a diamond-sharp lens... I also recommend The Last Resort as a mordant satire on death and love.

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Yin and Yang: Two Lives, Two Loves
In alternating chapters devoted to each character, six months in the life of Virginia ("Vinnie") Miner, an unmarried Ivy League college professor for whom the sweet bird of youth has long flown away, are contrasted with the same period in the life of Fred Turner - young and handsome, and a junior faculty member of the same Ivy League college. Although they barely know each other, they are both members of the English department and are both on sabbatical in London at the same time doing research.

Their stories are studies in contrast and in similarities. Fred is lonely, having recently become estranged from his wife; Fred loathes England (at least, at first). Vinnie is beyond lonely - at 54, she has settled into a life of comforting routine, even if the routine involves frequent trips to her beloved England. Fred turns heads; Vinnie is "the sort of person no one ever notices."

They each find romance in England. Fred is upwardly mobile - he falls in love with a beautiful and aristocratic actress of some fame. Vinnie is shocked to find herself having a romance with a sanitary engineer from Tulsa, a man who rarely reads books and with whom she would barely have deigned to have talked had they not been thrown together.

Which of these two relationships goes on to become a life-love, and which ends in humiliating farce? It is the genius of this book that the answer, like life itself, remains unpredictable throughout the novel, right up to its surprising end. This novel was highly deserving of the Pulitzer Prize.