A subtly humorous
novel, Foreign Affairs won
the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. It is long on characterization and witty
observations about life, love, and living abroad. Vinnie Miner and Fred
Turner, two professors of English literature at fictional Corinth
University in upstate New York (modeled on Cornell University, where
Lurie teaches English), are coincidentally in London at the same time
to do research. Though in the same university department, they're not
chummy. Fred, not yet 30, is a generation younger than 54-year-old
Vinnie. They cross paths in London now and then, and some of the same
people figure in their experiences, but their stories are essentially
separate. Vinnie and Fred are presented as contrasting types, and each
chapter is devoted to one or the other.
Vinnie is single, small, mousey. Her colleagues would be surprised to
learn that she has enjoyed uncommitted sexual affairs. Despite her
academic specialty — children's folk rhymes — she
doesn't
really love children and never wanted any of her own. Fred, on the
other hand, is a hunk whose looks haven't kept him from being miserably
lonely at the start of the book. His wife had suddenly left him before
he left the U.S., and Fred is wretched, having trouble working and
unable to find anything likable about London.
The book's title hints at what's going to happen. Fred falls
precipitously in love with an aristocratic British actress. Love creeps
up on Vinnie; a American sanitary engineer who disturbed her privacy on
the flight over intrudes on her space again, and Vinnie gradually
discovers he has endearing qualities even though he never reads books.
Though the sudden upsurge of activity (mistaken identity, a death) at
the end of the book comes off as somewhat contrived, and Fred's
deliverance seems too pat, Foreign
Affairs until
then is a believable tale about two unlikely affairs. How Vinnie and
Fred each emerge from their experiences is not predictable.
An interesting aspect is the picture Lurie draws of academia. Vinnie is
a credible scholar, but there's little to indicate that Fred is
actually turned on by his field, 18th-century English literature. Lurie
also shows us what wisdom is and is not: Just because you have
a PhD and teach at an Ivy League university (and in a field whose bread
and butter is the human condition) doesn't mean you won't be as muddled
about relationships as the rest of us.
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