There is some firm evidence in the five novels she has so far published that Alison Lurie should be a better novelist than she is. Her reputation up to now does not indicate that she has been widely appreciated for the qualities she does possess, although she has acquired over the years a certain small cult following, and her latest novel, The War Between the Tates,¹ appears to be winning her the kind of popular attention which may prove only that her limitations have at last begun to be recognized as seeming more attractive than her virtues. That novel, at any rate, represents a descent from some relatively serious level of intention into a flossiness which was only occasionally detectable in her before and which may well be attracting her natural public.

Yet from time to time even here and in the best of her earlier work Miss Lurie reveals qualities that merit—and have seldom been given—close critical consideration. She has a satirical edge which, when it is not employed in hacking away at the obvious, is often eviscerating. She writes a prose of great clarity and concision, an expository language that efficiently serves her subject but that does not stylize upon it. She has many true things to say about the various modes of self-deception and distraction by which we endure the passage of life in these peculiarly trivializing times, and she often says them in a manner she has earned entirely by herself and that represents an authentic fictional voice. Yet there is also something hobbled and hamstrung about her engagement of experience, something that causes her again and again to fall short of what one feels to be her full capacity to extract the truth of her materials. She seems regularly to be aware of more than she can imaginatively comprehend, to be able to describe more than she can make thematically significant. Above all, there is a lack in her of the kind of adventurousness usually associated with important talent, a conventionality or timidity that frequently causes her to make formulations of reality which in a part of her mind she must know to be clichés, and to pass over without examining certain possibilities for satire which a more radical talent would recognize as the most fertile possibilities to be found in her chosen subject.

These deficiencies manifest themselves perhaps most clearly in Miss Lurie’s heavy dependence on sexual intrigue for the dramatic complication of her fiction. In all her novels except Imaginary Friends, which seems to have no recognizable place in her canon, there is a monotonous sameness of situation which might appear to represent a ringing of changes on, and a progressively deepening exploration of, an obsessive subject until one sees that really there is no changing or deepening. Love and Friendship, The Nowhere City, Real People, and The War Between the Tates all have to do with the experience of adultery, usually as enacted by academics or artists upon other academics and artists, or by academics upon academic wives and graduate students. The setting in each case is the university community or artist colony—in Real People it is a scarcely disguised Yaddo—and as a rule the sexual drama is given such force as it possesses through being played out against the background of the dreariest middle-class respectability, boredom, child-breeding, and generalized spiritual and material shabbiness. What usually happens is that as a result of having good sex with somebody not one’s legal spouse, the errant husband or wife achieves some temporary sense of rejuvenated identity which may or may not be to the ultimate advantage of marriage and community.

It is one of the older saws of criticism that extramarital sex in literature is not of terribly much interest in itself, however graphically it may be described. Its value lies in the illumination it gives to character and in the extent to which it poses some fresh challenge to the always fragile balance of tensions existing between the erotic imperatives of the self and the official hypocrisies of the public world. The penetration of the illusion that snobbery generates is, in Lionel Trilling’s excellent phrase, the proper aim of the social novel, and adultery is one of the traditional, if hackneyed, modes through which this aim is accomplished. But Miss Lurie seems never to grasp the implications of the melodrama around which four of her five novels are constructed, and there are insufficient moral prohibitions in the society she describes to give it the depth of implication she is unable to perceive within it. She appears to feel that it is enough if her characters dare to commit the heresy of climbing into bed with one another. That is enough to insure their meaning as characters and to justify their presence in her novels. Her treatment of adultery suffers, in short, from arbitrariness and inconsequence. The insight it affords us into the natures of the people who commit it is finally reducible to some idea of the beneficial or destructive effects of orgasmic liberation, which is repeatedly seen as in and for itself an apocalyptic experience. The academic husband in The War Between the Tates finds his graduate student a more imaginative and responsive lay than his timorous, rather frigid wife. The academic wife in Love and Friendship is sexually awakened by a professor of music, in The Nowhere City by a California psychiatrist. As a result, the lives of these people either do or do not undergo some important change—a sufficiency of meaning perhaps in the one-dimensional world of the soap-opera serial, where what happens next may finally be all that matters, but a gross insufficiency in novels that seem to promise some genuine revelation of character on a plane subtler and more complicated than that simply of the variety of sexual things one does to others or others do to one.

It may be just here that Miss Lurie can be seen to share the dilemma of any satirical novelist of manners whose work must depend for its vitality in some direct way upon the vitality of the life he is attempting to satirize. The dilemma is deepened, furthermore, when the novelist’s subject is contemporary academic manners, for nothing is more obvious to anyone familiar with the university scene of the last twenty years than that the dramatic possibilities for a fiction dealing with academic life are not what they once were—nor has the gradual growth of an encrustation of cliché around some of its most typifying characters and situations made the problem any less difficult. It seems scarcely conceivable that a novelist of whatever degree of talent would be able to write academic fiction today without being obliged to write through the precedent established by such classic practitioners of the genre as Helen Howe, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, Robie Macauley, and Bernard Malamud, at the same time that he would necessarily be writing without most of the advantages which these writers possessed.

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If it is true that effective satire depends on the disparity between pretense and practice, self-delusion and the reality which reveals it to be in fact self-delusion, then it is clear that these essential elements, while they obviously continue to exist in academic life, no longer exist in conditions that once caused them to seem respresentative of that life, nor are they embodied in personality types that once made them easily accessible to the satirist. The pompous and priggish or bumbling and generally ineffectual professor was a reality in American universities long before he became the paradigmatic buffoon figure in a hundred academic novels—and so too was the lecherous or the politically vicious professor through whom it was possible to dramatize the comic contrast between the principles of monastic dedication and intellectual disinterestedness normally attributed to the teaching profession and the prurience and petty-mindedness so often visible behind the pious façade. It is very much the sort of contrast so effectively dramatized in M*A*S*H, a film about a medical team assigned to a field hospital during the Korean war. Just as the academic novel typically exploits our expectation that professors are, or ought to be, Olympian, the film exploits our assumption that practitioners of medicine are at all times noble and heroic. The spectacle of doctors swapping dirty jokes while probing a battle casualty’s viscera for shell fragments outrages our pieties and makes us laugh, not merely at the incongruity of the conduct but at pieties which have caused us to see the conduct as incongruous. And so, for similar reasons, we might laugh at the spectacle of academics sabotaging their colleagues in the committee room or copulating with their students on the committee room floor.

But all this is dependent upon traditional patterns of moral expectation and idealization inherited from the past and made habitual to us through our exposure to them in past literature, and they are coming to have less and less relation to the actualities of either the medical or the academic profession. In fact, most of the qualities we have traditionally attributed to social and occupational groups—primness in female school teachers, sanctimoniousness in clergymen, obsequiousness in salespeople, competitiveness in businessmen—no longer accurately characterize these groups and are therefore no longer valid as designations when used for the purposes of satire. What obviously has happened is that all these groups have come increasingly to resemble one another in their style of behavior and personality. The new egalitarianism. which is a mallei of both political and psychological orientation, has homogenized then characteristics, washed out such idiosyncrasies as they may once have possessed, and made it extremely difficult to distinguish among them. In academic life this has become particularly evident and is perhaps more striking than elsewhere, if only because the teaching profession, like the medical, has been among the most heavily burdened by moral idealizations projected by those who still take seriously the moral valuation academics once placed upon themselves. Hence, it is possible for large numbers of otherwise enlightened people to read novels featuring characters modeled on professors as they used to be and feel satisfied that they have been given a realistic view of academic life as it now is.

Yet the truth is that over the last twenty years the realities of academic life have drastically changed. Through a process of perhaps inevitable attrition, coupled with the damage done by the student-activist movement of the 60’s. the self-esteem of professors has been eroded to the point where it is now a better subject for pathos than for satire. The typifying academic stance today is not self-importance but self-deprecation, not the severity that accompanies the effort to enforce intellectual standards, but the laxity that follows from the loss of a sense of standards and a fear that, if standards in fact do continue to exist, it would be in some way dangerous or undemocratic to enforce them. Particularly among younger faculty members it is possible to identity a new personality style characterized by a nervous, ingratiating geniality, a seemingly cultivated limpness of manner, a carelessness of speech and dress, an air of humility and apology, that inside or outside the classroom might identify them with equal justice as Madison Avenue executives, television newscasters, junior State Department officials, or, for that matter, junior shoe clerks. Their pretension is, if anything, their complete lack of pretension. Their self-delusion derives not from a belief that they are consecrated to a special calling and are therefore above the temptations that beset ordinary men, but rather that they are no different from anybody else, have no wish to be, and would be perfectly satisfied if they could be left alone to pursue the modest pleasures of being ordinary. Unfortunately for the satirist, this sense of ordinariness is, in the case of a great many academics, not in the least self-delusory but issues from an altogether sound assessment of the facts. Hence, there is no snobbery to be penetrated, no pomposity for the satirist to deflate.

Another feature of academic life made obsolete by the devolution-any processes of history is the experience, which until fairly recently most professors could take for granted, of inhabiting in the university a social organism that is parochial, intimate, restrictive, and closely monitory. Academic novelists of the past found their most dependable source of dramatic tension in the conflict between individual characters and the pressures of a society in which they felt confined or too much under scrutiny, so that if they misbehaved, they risked exposure, scandal, even the possibility of professional disaster. Such a society may still exist in some of the smaller academic communities, but it is no longer typical of the academic experience in general. What is much more common today is the abstracted and depersonalized situation of the multiversity, and it is extremely difficult to see how the kind of intrigue that interests Miss Lurie and has interested other novelists before her could have very much meaning or reality there. The members of a multiversity society are usually notable for the hypothetical nature of their sense of belonging to a society and by their merely propinquitous connection with one another. Human relations are tenuous at best or exclusively professional at worst, and it is entirely possible to exist for years in the multiversity complex without knowing or particularly caring to know what one’s colleagues are doing in their extracurricular lives. There would, furthermore, be very little likelihood that they would be capable of committing any act heinous enough to bring down upon them collective censure or even collective notice, not only because academics are remarkable for their lack of daring but because the social and moral terms by which the conduct of others can be related significantly to oneself or judged in relation to the community have either broken down or never existed.

What one is finally forced to confront is the progressive trivialization of academic life in America, a process surely connected with the erosion of professorial self-esteem and the loss of a sense of existing among human realities in a real society. But the serious consequence not only for those who care personally about the quality of academic life but for a novelist committed, as Miss Lurie seems to be, to making literary use of that life is quite simply a diminution of dramatic possibility, the decline of specific experiences involving contingency and risk, the threat of exposure and the sacrifice of something precious, important, or necessary. Professors can scarcely be ridiculed by the satirist for sabotaging one another in the committee room if they ass’ume that in so doing they are merely playing the customary dirty politics of academic life. There is very little drama left in student-faculty love affairs if they no longer carry the potential of having dire consequences. In these days they can so easily pass undetected; the girl can pass the course with high marks and un-pregnant; the professor can keep the girl and his tenure.

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In Miss Lurie’s fiction of academic life a situation that may once have been crucial may seem to be of uncertain significance or to have a merely hoked-up significance just because the actualities of academic life have depleted it of drama. The student in The War Between the Tates will either marry the professor or she will not. If she gets pregnant, as she finally does, she will either have an abortion or she will run off, as she finally does, with an accommodating young man to a commune in California where she will give birth to what may or may not be the professor’s child. Before the descent of this deus ex machina, the professor’s wife has already seriously considered giving him a divorce so that he will be free to marry the girl. But since the girl decides to leave, that measure proves unnecessary, and at the end of the novel it appears that the professor either will or will not return to his wife. On the face of it, such problems would seem to be swollen with dramatic, not to say melodramatic, possibility. But they actually are not because we recognize that behind them there is absolutely nothing at stake—no risk, no threat, no anguish. The society in which they and the characters exist is much too limited, drab, and morally diffuse to give them consequence. In fact, the defining feature of that society is its power to draw all potential extremes of conduct and feeling into a dead middle, a deactivating nullity, to see to it that actions shall have no consequences, that nobody will have to suffer or pay or be put to any kind of serious inconvenience. It is a society made for and by the burgeoning new population of academic Babbitts, and it is the ideal medium for their relentlessly bourgeois pursuits.

There is evidence in Miss Lurie’s novels that she has some awareness of this aspect of academic life, but she treats it as little more than stage-setting for her favorite drama of sexual intrigue. Perhaps it would require a talent the size of Mailer’s or Bellow’s to recognize that just here, in the contrast between the professional function of academics and their way of life, is to be found what little remains of interesting literary material in the university scene. These supposedly gifted and fearless seekers after truth, these staunch defenders of the things of the mind and the spirit, the best that has been thought and said, living out their days in complacent scruffiness—the incongruity is both ludicrous and rather frightening, and it could form the basis of a great subject. But Miss Lurie’s novels do not engage it because her imagination remains trapped amid the cliches of academic life, in situations which history has rendered obsolete and crises which have lost their power, in both actuality and art, to matter very much.

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¹ Random House, 372 pp., $7.95.

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