Truth and Consequences: A Novel [Hardcover]

Alison Lurie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2005

“One can read Lurie as one might read Jane Austen, with continual delight,” Joyce Carol Oates has said about novelist Alison Lurie. And author John Fowles has remarked, “There is no American writer I have read with more consistent pleasure and sympathy over the years.” Now, with her fine new novel, Lurie returns to the setting that have delighted her fans throughout her long career— the university campus.

An energetic and attractive forty, Jane Mackenzie is the administrative director at Corinth University’s Center for the Humanities. Unfortunately, her formerly healthy and athletic husband Alan, a history fellow at the center, has suffered a debilitating back injury and is becoming more and more dependent on Jane. But with the arrival of Delia Delaney, a pre-Raphaelite beauty, bestselling writer, and the newest celebrity at the center, Alan gradually begins to recover, becoming well enough for a not-so-harmless liaison. Meanwhile, Jane, who all her life has tried to be a good woman, finds herself falling in love with Delia’s husband.

A modern social satire that recalls the best of David Lodge and Mary McCarthy, Truth and Consequences is one of Lurie’s finest works, echoing her popular university novels Foreign Affairs and The War Between the Tates.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lurie's various academic romances, set against the backdrop of a thinly veiled Cornell University, point in a straight line to tragicomic double-think relationship writers like Lorrie Moore. This latest foray begins promisingly: Jane MacKenzie fails to recognize her own husband, Alan, as he approaches their house from a distance, so bent and changed is he by his aching back. He's an architecture professor (expert on Victoriana); she's a university administrator. When visiting poet Delia Delaney takes up residence, it's Jane who has to attend to her diva-like demands, while simultaneously trying to cope with an incapacitated Alan. Once he's up and around, though, sexy and selfish Delia toys with, then seduces him. The affair gives Alan a midlife lift, and, on discovery, gives Jane a reason to leave him, perhaps for Henry, Delia's ombudsman husband and Jane's highly organized mirror-image. The problem is that Lurie, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Foreign Affairs is everything this isn't, doesn't seem much interested in fleshing out her characters' romps. Remedial repetitions of basic facts, character descriptions and plot points throughout give the proceedings a strangely clinical feel, as if her characters' reactions were too base to engage with fully: they are reported almost dutifully, though not without offhand flashes of crackly brilliance.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Like Lurie's "The War Between the Tates," this is a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in. Alan, a professor of architectural history at a college that sounds like Cornell (where Lurie teaches), married Jane because she reminded him of a classical building-"order, harmony, and tradition"-but, when his life is yanked askew by a back injury, he can't stand her orderliness anymore. Enter a femme fatale, in the form of a visiting fellow-a poet, all Pre-Raphaelite hair and vatic utterance. The inevitable happens, and, thanks to Lurie's psychological acuity, so does much that wasn't inevitable. Jane leaves Alan, but she comes by every day, depositing a microwavable meal, to his fury and his relief. (Otherwise, what would he eat?) Alan is the most likable character, but, as in the best comedies, everyone gets justice, and no one escapes it.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (October 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670034398
• ISBN-13: 978-0670034390
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,123,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Myth and Mischief in Academia, December 22, 2006

By 

Stephen Schwartz (Ithaca, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Truth and Consequences: A Novel (Hardcover)

Truth and Consequences by Alison Lurie is a novel of academia. The setting is a thinly disguised Ithaca, Tompkins County, NY and Cornell University. Nevertheless this book is only marginally realistic. The characters are exaggerated, the academic descriptions simplistic, and the plot likewise. Lurie's descriptions are trite in the extreme and much of her writing is like a "crisis romance"-type paperback. The women (especially Jane) moan and sob, shiver with a thrill when their lovers touch them, and so on. Much of the dialogue is equally flat with lots of "yeah"s and similarly unacademic phrases. None of the characters seem particularly well-educated or very interested in academic pursuits. They are interested in themselves and their failing marriages and affairs, and middle-age health problems. In many superficial ways this is a typical trite "chick" book, as another reviewer mentioned.

Nevertheless I very much liked this book, and I am a guy. I should disclose that I live in Ithaca and attended Cornell. Many of the details of the setting are accurate--The Farmers' Market, the lake, the roads, the campus, and weather. Despite the flatness of the characters Lurie conjures some kind of magic and makes them come alive and in a way that made me care about them. I was not bored for a moment reading the book, and I bore easily with domestic romances. Somehow the author conjures out of the simplistic, trite, and flat contours a story and characters that are interesting and engaging. I found myself wrapped up in their marital and romantic intrigues. In some ways Lurie's writing reminds, perhaps, of Louis Auchincloss'. Simple, not realistic, but representative of social realities and with a kind of universal appeal that transcends mere storytelling. And Lurie manages to keep our interest without any descriptions of sloppy sex, violence, perversion, or insanity,unlike e.g. John Banville's Shroud which has all of those and fails dismally. See my review. The contrast could not be more stark than that between Banville's Shroud and Lurie's Truth and Consequences. Yet both are about the romantic intrigues of aging academics. Banville's failed and disgusting novel is everything Truth and Consequences is not. Truth and Consequences is all quite bland--really, nothing you couldn't read to your ten year old niece. How Lurie does it, I'm not quite sure, but she does.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's All Academic, August 31, 2006

By 

Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Truth and Consequences: A Novel (Hardcover)

Considering that Alison Lurie is an award-winning novelist, I was surprised at the simplistic tone of this novel. As many reviewers have written, the beginning is quite promising; I was instantly captured by the first few paragraphs. Unfortunately, that interest was not sustained.

The dialogue is often stilted and totally unrealistic. And the gender-specific portrayals are downright annoying. All the men "smile" (I could not count how many times the author uses the words, "Henry smiled." All the women "wail" (as in: Jane wailed.) It was difficult for me to believe an administrator went through life "wailing". Delia, the femme fatale of the novel, is so "helpless and vulnerable" with her "huge gray eyes" (repeated ad nauseum) that it is hard for me to believe that she ever DID become a famous writer. She sounds like Marilyn Monroe!

None of the characters are overly developed. Jane and Henry -- the suffering caregivers -- are saintly and put-upon. Delia and Jane's husband are defined by their physical struggles and are totally unlikeable...with barely a redeeming characteristic, unless it's their talent and fame.

I'm an avid reader, and were it not for the fact that this was a short novel, I would have simply put it down. Not worth your time!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Low-key look at relationships for academics (3.5 *s), December 19, 2005

By 

J. Grattan "Ideas can move the world" (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Truth and Consequences: A Novel (Hardcover)

One might expect that a book with a mix of characters affected by one or all of marital strife and infidelity, constant debilitating pain from illness or injury, and the blockage or erosion of academic or creative energy would be explosive or tragic. But there are few fireworks here. The author almost suggests that working through such difficulties is just part of academic life.

The arrival of eccentric, egotistic, arresting, and cultish poet Delia Delaney as a visiting scholar at Corinth U brings out issues that Alan MacKenzie, an architectural historian, and his wife Jane have been having over the last year. Jane, the administrator of the center for humanities that invited Delia, has seen her planned, idyllic marriage turn sour as she has had to wait hand-and-foot on Alan after he suffered an unremitting back injury. Jane, ever practical, immediately perceives that Delia is a user of people and, in fact, is unlikely to fulfill her obligations to the center. But at this point, Delia shares more with Alan than does Jane. She suffers from excruciating pain when her weekly migraines hit, but more importantly she sees and encourages Alan's creativity. The limited sexual entanglement of Delia and Alan merely hastens a rearrangement of affairs.

The book is brief; there is not much plot; and the characters are minimally drawn. It just seems to be a low-key look at the possibilities of long-term relationships for eccentrics and academics as they proceed through life.