”In this culture, where energy and egotism are rewarded in the young and good-looking, plain aging women are supposed to be self-effacing, uncomplaining--to take up as little space and breathe as little air as possible.” Cupid as Link Boy by Joshua ReynoldsVinnie Miner is 54 years old. She has never been what has been deemed attractive. She went through all the obligatory attempts to improve her appearance as she marched through her twenties, thirties, and forties. None of them worked. ”Indeed it would be kinder to draw a veil over some of Vinnie’s later attempts at stylishness: her bony forty-year-old legs in an orange leather miniskirt; her narrow mouse’s face peering from behind teased hair and an oversized pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses.” When she reached her fifties, almost with a sense of relief, she discovered that she had aged better than expected. She certainly didn’t suffer from the tragedy of a faded beauty. She decided that if she couldn’t be attractive at least she could look the part of a lady. She is an anglophile and has more than a little desire to seduce an Englishman, really any one of them would do, but a literary genius is preferred. She has received a grant for six months to go to London and research children’s rhymes for her next book. A dream come true.On the plane she finds herself sitting next to this large, florid faced man in a western cut suit. He is from Tulsa. He was in sanitation work (there is always good money doing what other people don’t want to do). He is chatty. A nightmare! Here she is trying to be as English as possible and here is this American buffoon reminding her every time he opens his mouth that she isn’t in England yet. In an act of pure desperation she throws a copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy to him. Shockingly, he settles into his seat and calmy reads the whole book leaving her in peace to read the third part of the trilogy by J. G. Farrell. She isn’t done with Chuck Mumpson, not by a long shot. Like a lost puppy he just keeps turning up on her doorstep. Meanwhile her colleague Fred Turner is in London as well to research the poems of John Gay. It isn’t going so well for him because he has hooked up with an actress named Lady Rosemary. Even when he isn’t with her he is thinking about her. Her lavish lifestyle is pressing well past what a young professor can afford. Fred and Vinnie mostly want to avoid each other. ”Fred Turner knows, of course, that he is a handsome, athletic-looking young man, the type that directors employ to battle carnivorous vegetables. It would be going too far to say that he has never derived any satisfaction from this face, but he has often wished that his appearance was less striking. He has the features, and the physique, of an Edwardian hero: classically sculpted, over-finished, liked the men in Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings. If he had lived before World War II, he might have been more grateful for his looks; but since then it has not been fashionable for Anglo-Saxon men to be handsome in this style unless they are homosexual.” A Charles Dana Gibson male.Now despite her unfortunate lack of charming features Vinnie has racked up a list of lovers over the years. She even got married once for a short period of time. ”In her youth Vinnie made the painful error of allowing herself to care seriously for some of these people. Against her better judgement, she even married one of them who was on the tearful rebound from a particularly aggravating beauty and, like a waterlogged tennis ball, had rolled into the nearest hole.”Yes...ouch...yes, I know you laughed... nervously. I winced and laughed. Vinnie has this self-deprecating manner that is brutal. She even has an invisible dog she has named Fido who shows up when her self-pity becomes all consuming. ”She saw her first erect penis; in spite of all she now knew, her first thought was that it looked infected: sore, red, puffy. Though she has tried to suppress them, these ideas are never far from Vinnie’s consciousness. She has never got used to the way sex looks.”Now Vinnie distrusts sexual desire especially when it is expressed towards her. Although with this vision of a penis in her mind I’m amazed she doesn’t have a cleaver ready to hand whenever one raises it’s ugly head in her direction. She is shocked and surprised when the docile, clumsy puppy from Tulsa decides that he wants to make love to her. ” When she is with Chuck she feels more than usually small, intellectual, and timid.”This isn’t supposed to happen. She is supposed to be making love to ”Daniel Aaron, M.H. Abrams, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Walker Percy, Mark Schorer, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren or Richard Wilbur.”How could things go this wrong? But: ”Why does London look so marvelously well today? And why does she feel for the first time that she’s not only seeing it, but is part of it? Something has changed, she thinks. She isn’t the same person she was: she has loved and been loved.”I do believe that any place from the penthouse apartment to the squalors of ghettos is improved by being in love. Everything has more vibrancy whether it is the shimmer of an apricot evening dress or the coarse fiber of a potato sack dress. Knobby knees or shapely calves or lush lips or crooked teeth all are beautiful because they belong to the person you love. Most of the book I just wanted to pick Vinnie up off the ground and envelop her in a big hug. I wanted to chuck her under the chin every time her lips started to quiver. I wanted to rebuff each and every one of her self-denigrating comments with a bouquet of assurances. This book reminds me of an interview with Dustin Hoffman when he talks about how dressing as a woman in Tootsie had him thinking about all the interesting women he has never known because they didn’t fulfill the physical demands that men are brought up to admire. Check out the clip where he actually gets emotional trying to explain it. http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/07/dusti...Alison Lurie has a lot to say about getting older, never being pretty, being too attractive, being too successful, never quite fulfilling your expectations for yourself, all of which can be deemed assets or deficits depending on what your evolving priorities look like. This book is witty, truthful (sometimes painful so), intelligent, warm, humorous, and ultimately a rewarding read whose characters will become a part of the narrative of your life. Highly recommended! 4.25 stars!
Charming, perceptive and told with discreet humour, Foreign Affairs is the Pulitzer Prize winning novel about two American academics on six months study leave in Britain. Vinnie (Virginia) is a single 54yo professor from Corinth, an admitted Anglophile in Britain to collect notes on nursery folklore and looking forward to seeing her academic and theatrical British friends. Fred is a very handsome 28yo lecturer from Vinnie's department and in Britain to write a book on the eighteenth century poet John Gay but his marriage has broken up on the eve of his departure and he's lonely and depressed. The two paramours in this tale are polar opposites: Vinnie's guy is from Oklahoma, a big man who dresses like a cowboy and Fred's lover is a titled British actress with many sides to her character. Vinnie's a bit of a snob; at first she strives to keep her American lover apart from her British friends. She finds he has awakened in her a desire and passion she thought she would not experience again so keeping him outside her British life becomes a struggle . Usually having women throw themselves at him, Fred struggles constantly to claim his new lover's full attention and heart. She constantly stymies Fred, withholds her affections and appears to have many other suitors. The situations which arise for Vinnie and Fred are surprising, emotive, sometimes wryly comical but always thought provoking. As the story progresses, the lives of these four characters begin to cross at the soirees and parties of their British friends and associates. Lurie resonates beautifully the many facets of relationships, passion and love while mostly alluding to the sexual. She also gives a glimpse of the private lives of the British upper class and theatrical world. Mostly, this novel is about the complex nature of relationships rather than one of romance. It also showcases how we often find not what we want but, in fact, what we need. The totally unexpected ending of this novel both surprised and satisfied me as a reader. Foreign Affairs will give pause for thought but also delivers wonderfully subtle humor. This is no racy romp neither is it fluff - a classification I personally dislike; it is elegant, insightful and ever entertaining. Highly recommended for everyone. 4★
What do You think about Foreign Affairs (2006)?
Vinnie, one of the two main characters whose stories are the focus of this book, is a middle aged academic, not very attractive by her own description. She's a little cranky. Yet I began to like her when she started a relationship with a goodhearted man with whom she has little in common. Her young colleague Fred, whose story intertwines Vinnie's, has no money, no spouse (they split before he went to London without her), and no hope. He meets an actress who introduces him to new people and a more glamorous life than he would have on his own, but she soon proves to be, well, an actress 24/7. This book was readable, entertaining at times, and I liked the London setting. I could never quite see how the two colleagues connected, though, because most of the time they didn't, except that Vinnie introduced Fred to the actress. Sometimes I felt sorry for Fred; sometimes I wanted to shake him until his lovely head sprang off his shoulders like a jack-in-the-box. And I knew that Vinnie needed to make the decision she didn't make.Nice to see a book where a middle aged woman could fall in love and have it be the center of the story. It doesn't happen often enough.
—Kim
*Foreign Affairs opens with Vinnie Miner, an established academic in her mid-fifties and ‘the sort of person that no one ever notices’ (p. 5) boarding a plane for London. Not a very prepossessing beginning, one might think, but Vinnie is followed by an invisible dog, and that accessory alone means one has to read more. The novel is the tale of two visiting American scholars from the same English department of an Ivy League college. Each is on sabbatical in London for several months. Vinnie, an established academic in the field of children’s literature travels to London to further her research on children’s playground rhymes. Fred Turner, ‘a handsome, athletic-looking young man with the features, and physique of an Edwardian hero’ (p. 29) is at the start of his academic career, and is in London to write a book on the eighteenth century poet and dramatist, John Gay. The intended trajectory of each character is disturbed, and their preconceptions about themselves, about others and about their work begin to fray in the wake of independently contracted amorous entanglements. The net result is a beautifully written, skilfully constructed comedy of manners, which largely plays out in the imagination of the key characters, conveying a panoply of witty, cutting and at times deliciously bitchy observations on England and the English as seen from the two different, naïve but equally literary perspectives of each character, and countered as wittily and cuttingly by their observations on their American compatriots. Incisive cultural juxtapositions are introduced with dexterity: for example, from the disparity between the two countries’ rules for charades, Fred concludes that ‘[America] rewards speed, and individual achievement, and encourages frantic attempts to communicate with compatriots who literally or metaphysically don’t speak your language’ while the British combine ‘verbal ingenuity, in-group loyalty and cooperation, love of public performance, and private childishness’ (p. 95).*Foreign Affairs is funny, moving and very provocative. It plays out largely in the imagination of the protagonists, whose experiences are filtered through classical English literature. While their London shimmers and glooms, spawning crowds of ghosts, present as well as past, reality bubbles relentlessly beneath this illusion, periodically breaking through to discomfort and ultimately destroy it. *Foreign Affairs was published in 1984 and so predates much that is now regarded as essential to social interaction – householders have only a single, decidedly non-mobile phone; print culture is in the ascendant and people write letters and postcards and use typewriters; and the virtual is the exclusive domain of the imagination. This only adds to the novel. While an indictment of privileged ignorance, it also unwittingly elicits nostalgia for the less hectic, more civilised lifestyle of the recent past. A second reading of *Foreign Affairs reveals something more of the extent of Lurie’s mastery as novelist. Although the novel is brimming with references to English literary classics, Lurie’s erudition is administered lightly. Her narrative style is unobtrusive, delicate and precise, and hindsight shows the quietness with which she introduces intimations about the story by way of ultimately crucial juxtapositions, allowing these to be treated on a first reading in the same way as the characters do.Alison Lurie’s *Foreign Affairs has been recently re-published by Open Road Integrated Media. Since the book is a delight to read the first time and more than merits rereading, it is to be hoped that this new edition will nudge those already familiar with the novel to revisit it, and prompt those who are not to make its acquaintance.
—MN
In the first few pages, I was amused to find one of the two primary characters reading The Singapore Grip - the novel I had finished just prior to starting this. Vinnie Miner is an English professor who specializes in children's literature. She is headed to London for 6 months on a research grant. The other primary character is Fred Turner, an assistant professor at the same University, who is also in London on a research grant. The alternating chapters are headed by first a children's rhyme (Vinnie's interest) and second by an excerpt from one of John Gay's poetry (Fred's interest). All of the characterizations are good, but the characterization of Vinnie is far better than just good. Perhaps that is my reaction because I can relate better to a woman past 50 than to a man not quite 30. These are real people even if I cannot relate to college professors and the opportunity to do research at the British Museum.While thinking what I might say about the prose, I thought of Elizabeth Strout, one of my favorite authors. As Lurie came first, I wonder how much Strout has been influenced by her. The story is presented without any huge drama, although there are a couple of short dramatic scenes. How much more quiet can it get with Vinnie sitting on a bench at the London Zoo watching the polar bears? It is what Vinnie thinks as she sits there that moves the story. For those who need big action, perhaps this is too quiet, but it is exactly the sort of story that I've found especially appeals to me.Here is another author I want to explore more fully. I hope my life expectancy lives up to the promise of my ancestors, as I keep adding and adding to the list of books I hope are in my future!
—Elizabeth (Alaska)
