Foreign Affairs
by Alison Lurie
Summary
Vinnie Miner is fifty four, unmarried, plain, and a professor of children's literature at Corinth University in upstate New York. She flies to London for six months to study schoolyard rhymes, accompanied everywhere by an imaginary dirty white dog named Fido, who is her self pity and who follows her whenever she thinks about her life. On the plane she is trapped beside Chuck Mumpson, a retired sanitary engineer from Tulsa in a fringed western jacket, who wants to talk about his ancestors and whom she finds embarrassing beyond words.
In a parallel plot Fred Turner, twenty eight, handsome, broke and separated from his wife, is in London failing to research an eighteenth century poet and taking up instead with a celebrated English actress whose life has considerably more moving parts than he anticipated.
Both plots are about the same thing: what the English and the Americans imagine about each other, and how much of a romance is conducted with a national fantasy rather than a person.
Vinnie is the great achievement. She is snobbish, self deceiving and quite unkind in her private commentary, and Lurie lets you enjoy her company for a hundred pages before making you notice how lonely the commentary is doing.
Chuck, meanwhile, is researching an ancestor he believes was a nobleman and turns out to have been something considerably less grand, and what he does with that discovery is the moment the novel stops being a comedy of manners.
Lurie is merciless about academic status and about the way Americans in England perform a version of themselves. The book is short, worldly, and funnier than almost anything else on this list, and the ending withholds the tidy resolution its shape promises. Best for readers who like Barbara Pym or David Lodge, and anyone who has gone abroad and behaved slightly unlike themselves.
Historical Context & Significance
Foreign Affairs won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Alison Lurie taught at Cornell for more than thirty years, and Corinth University, which appears across several of her novels, is a barely disguised Cornell. Ithaca spent decades matching her characters to real members of the faculty, a game she declined to settle.
Her other career was as a serious critic of children's literature, the field she gives to Vinnie Miner, and she wrote Don't Tell the Grown Ups on the subversive tradition in books for children. She also published The Language of Clothes, on dress as a system of meaning.
Corinth recurs across her fiction, most famously in The War Between the Tates, the campus novel that made her name in the 1970s, so readers who like Vinnie's world have somewhere obvious to go next. Lurie kept writing into her nineties, and died in 2020 at ninety four.