American Literature (2)

Posted on February 6, 2005 by acb

Poking around the second-hand bookshops of Walden on Saturday, I found an Alison Lurie novel I didn’t know existed. Other people might get that excited about the discovery of lost plays of Sophocles. I just want to say that The Last Resort is the most ruthlessly plotted of all her books; and that I have discovered where I go when I sleep — I model for her clever, pompous, self-pitying characters., There’ really can’t have been anyone who writes so well and so cruelly about self-pity as Alison Lurie does. There is certainly no one who has made me laugh quite so loudly for so long.

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2 Responses to American Literature (2)

  1. Andrew Conway says:
    February 7, 2005 at 1:25 pm

    Count me among Lurie’s admirers. I can’t think of any novelist who writes as well as she does about the stupidity of intelligent people.

    Have you read Familiar Spirits, her account of the poet James Merrill, his partner and their disastrous experiments with a ouija-board?. If you haven’t, do get hold of it. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Much of it is set in Key West, so it would be interesting to read it alongside The Last Resort.

  2. acb says:
    February 7, 2005 at 1:31 pm

    No. I haven’t read Familiar Spirits. thank you. I will. The War between the Tates is one of the novels I think most nearly perfect; I’m not sure why but one test is that every time I reread it my sympathies are pulled in a different direction.

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