Customer Reviews

Truth and Consequences: A Novel

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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.

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!

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.

Pulitzer Prize winner Alison Lurie once again sets her sights and satiric pen on scholarly saints and sinners by placing "Truth and Consequences" in a university community. Lurie, as many know, teaches writing, folklore and literature at Cornell University. However, Jane MacKenzie, her protagonist, is not a teacher but an administrator and a good, faithful wife. She and Alan, a professor, have been happily wed for many years. They're a couple most would envy - intellectual, well positioned in life, and secure.

Their well ordered existence begins to crumble when Alan develops a back problem. It becomes so debilitating that his career suffers and Jane finds herself becoming his nurse.

Sad to say it isn't a miracle of medicine that seems to cure Alan's back but the solicitations of newly arrived Delia Delaney, a beautiful best-selling novelist. She, in turn, is married to Henry who eventually finds himself attracted to Jane.

What a pleasure it is to hear about the romps and relationships among the intelligentsia as related in the stage trained voice of Jamie Heinlen. She often appears in New York theater, a training that is evident in her understated yet compelling performance. Heinlen effortlessly glides between the comic and the desperate treating listeners to a bravura reading.

- Gail Cooke

This story is about the allure, the costs, and the distortions that are part and parcel of pursing a life of creative genius vs. the security and mundane happiness of socially sanctioned traditional lifestyles.

Lurie gives us a story structure that is very simple: We have four people, two couples. The story starts off with AN EVENT / AN INJURY that shifts the normal flow of life for couple #1. Then couple #2 arrives and provides the possibility of new paths.


The simplicity of all of this is where Laurie's genius comes in: who will choose which path? When it comes to this question we focus primarily on the decisions to be made by couple #1. Underlying their options are the costs and benefits of the choices. Will she give up her traditional values in order to try and obtain a happiness that she thought she had but has been taken away from her? And is that traditional happiness really available or is it just an illusion? Can he come to understand the potential value of living in pain is that it can be a tool to see the world in a new way and that can help release his creative capacity? Or will he spiral further into dependency, depression and discontent?

The creative answer seems logical for the male-half of couple #1 -- but there is a price to pay. You cannot have the security of tradition if you want to truly explore the full range of creativity. To be creative, by definition, suggests you are pushing the limits of tradition. (ie: it requires pain.) The female-half of couple #2 shows him the new path but she is no one to rely on. She has no traditional moral compass. She indulges herself in every whim, manipulates everyone around her and cares for no one but herself. She explains her actions saying she must live for her work alone and she must do only that which furthers her work. But that is the point--you can't have or provide security and un-harnessed creativity at the same time. Ironically in the end her need for traditional security looks to have won out--until the final scene when she explains her latest actions and intentions. And of course her explanation only puts on display the fact that she will not be hampered by traditional morality. Wasn't it Woody Allen who claimed that his genius exempted him from traditional morality?

This is all interwoven and juxtaposed to the wife of couple #1 who fights her imprinted belief that she should stand by her man, no matter what cost to herself. That she must save her marriage--and that she can save her marriage through her own focused force of will. Yes, she slips into a forbidden relationship but as a result she feels tremendous guilt. She must fight her desire, her guilt and her self, while she tries to find a path to being "a good woman" and finding a secure future.

Of course there is a lot more that goes on--but these are the underlying battles of the tale as it unfolds. In the end she (of couple #1) up-holds a large part of her identity and gets a cozy predictable future (assuming one believes in happily ever after). And in the end he (of couple #1) has no idea what the future will bring but has moved far down the path of creative license.

It is a great battle that should be written about more. What are the costs of an unfettered creative life and the costs of holding too tightly to tradition? Lurie scratches the surface here--and in the process puts in a few of her own opinions using irony and satire a plenty. But even with this great debate going on under the story line the story is thin. So people who just want a good read / story will probably be disappointed --and people who want this debate fleshed-out will also feel the caloric intake is weak. But for me Lurie gets good marks for bringing up the topic in the first place.

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES by Alison Lurie
March 10, 2007

Rating: 4 Stars

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES was my introduction to Alison Lurie, and I was very impressed. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lurie has a knack for words. And for such a short novel, I felt she did a great job in writing about a complex set of people whose lies and lives are entwined in such a way that one can only imagine disaster awaiting all four of them by the end of the book.

Jane Mackenzie is the wife of an older man, a distinguished professor and scholar who had recently injured his back. His pain is so great it is debilitating, and now she deals with his new life, that of a handicapped man, who can barely move and expects his wife to be at his beck and call. Jane fell in love with his body and his mind, but what she sees now is not the man she married. But she carries on, knowing that she must be loyal to him, a man that gave her such love and pleasure for the past sixteen years.

Alan Mackenzie feels that things will not get any better. He's lost interest in his work, although he has just been accepted as a University Fellow where he teaches and Jane works. Coincidentally, Jane is an administrator for the Matthew Unger Humanities Center where Alan is to be working, and to compound his problems with his back, one of the new fellows will be Delia Delaney, known throughout as being difficult and somewhat of a diva. Upon arrival, she covets the office that Alan will be occupying, and hence the drama begins.

Delia's presence causes trouble for Alan and Jane's marriage, but Jane is unaware of the relationship that begins between the two of them. She thinks that Alan looks upon her with disdain, not realizing that he's actually lusting after Delia. On the other hand, Jane is befriended by Delia's husband Henry, a poet who no longer writes. Alan and Jane now live double lives, never letting on to the other what is going on. Jane's unhappiness in her own marriage, however, does not cause her to stray at first, but she does realize how horrible her relationship with Alan is once she develops a true friendship with Henry, a man that truly seems to care about Jane.

Readers will root for Jane and hope that Alan gets what's coming to him, and for me, the book ended on a note that I thought resolved all the relationships. Not everyone gets a happy ending. TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES was a wonderfully written book, short but to the point. I will definitely look for more by Alison Lurie.

Worthy wife Jane falls out of love with her husband Alan who has become totally self-centred because of consistent terrible back pains (the descriptions of which throughout the novel are rather repetitive). She falls guiltily in love with Henry, while Alan falls for the Henry's narcissistic, manipulative but gorgeous wife Delia. It is a slightly formulaic campus novel, and for most of the book you think it is fairly predictable; you think you can guess how it will probably end, but ... well, see whether you have guessed right. It's not as good a book as Lurie's Foreign Affairs, with which I was much more involved, but, like all her other books, this one is written with effortless ease and slips down easily and pleasantly.

Alison Lurie is a gifted, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, widely known for "The War Between the Tates," which is only one of her brilliant novels.

"Truth and Consequences" is a good, well-written, easy-to-read character study of a small slice of academia in a small town; it is positively wicked in it's dead-on perceptions of different academic "types," from the ethereal, airy Visiting Fellow, Delia Delaney, to the quickly fracturing couple, architectural professor Alan Mackenzie and his wife Jane, Administrative Manager for the small college at which they all work. In a sly comedy of manners, Lurie examines what can happen when the scales tip just a bit: Alan's chronic back pain from an injury changes him from a sexy,loveable husband to a whining petulant child; Jane turns from a happy, contented wife in love with her husband to one who mistakes him for a stranger; and strange, toxic love is in the air everywhere.

This is a fun book, and I highly recommend it, without reservation.

Alan Mackenzie is in excruciating pain. His back problems are getting worse and worse, and there seems to be nothing any treatment can do about it. He is grumpy and depressed and having a hard time getting any work done. Alan's wife Jane is in pain too. But her pain is emotional, not physical. In addition to her work, she has been caring for Alan, a less than gracious patient. He is sullen and demanding, and their marriage is feeling strained and lonely.

This is the scene Alison Lurie sets in her new novel, TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. And now into Alan and Jane's troubled relationship comes another couple to really shake things up. The famous and famously beautiful Delia Delaney is a visiting fellow at the university where both Alan and Jane work, and the three of them will be working in close proximity. Before Jane meets Delia, she meets her put-upon husband, Henry Hull, who it turns out is caring for Delia during her debilitating migraines much as Jane cares for Alan. So Delia and Henry's marriage parallels Alan and Jane's, and it is not long before the two caregivers and their two care-getters are drawn to each other.

While Jane tries to resist Henry's charm and persuasion, out of loyalty to Alan, Alan plunges head over heels into an odd romance with Delia. In describing the three relationships and the often absurd situation, Lurie blends realism, romance and humor. She never allows readers to doubt the pain of both Alan and Delia; it is their responses to pain we are asked to judge.

Alan and Delia are almost caricatures rather than characters, and Henry and Jane are near-saints (well, except for the extramarital affairs, but Lurie seems to suggest that here they are justified). This makes it hard to like any of them; they just don't feel real.

Lurie's style is easy and readable, and TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES is mostly enjoyable. But it doesn't really stick with you when it is over. Jane and Henry are supposed to be who we are rooting for, and we do --- for a while. But the story lacks depth and, for lack of a better word, oomph. It reads a bit more like a smart romance novel than the examination of the mores and intricacies of academic life that she seems to want to write.

This is a pleasant read, funny at times. The idea of the struggles and tensions in relationships between caregivers and those receiving care is interesting. However, Lurie does little with it. Despite these disappointments, TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES overall is a nice and capable novel.


--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

Alan and Jane Mackenzie seemed to have the perfect life. Both own a beautiful hundred and fifty year old house with its view of the lake in Corinth, New York, Alan, is tenured at the local University; he's a successful academic, a rising young star, and a renowned specialist on 18th century religious architecture. While not as academically accomplished as Alan, Jane has carved a respectable niche for herself, working as a university director at the, Matthew Unger Center for the Humanities. Jane prides herself on her efficiency and her ability to get the job done.

The cracks in the façade of their carefully layered marriage are exposed when Alan begins to suffer from chronic pain, after wrenching his back during a volleyball game. Wracked with an almost constant ache, and with no amount of medical expertise able to cure him, Alan turns almost overnight into a middle aged, overweight, cantankerous, narcotic-addled, and constipated misanthrope. Jane initially thinks that Alan will get better, but as the months wear on, it soon becomes obvious that her husband's affliction is not going to go away.

Forced into the role that she just didn't see coming, Jane begins to, not only question her marriage, but also her penchant for being "nice." As time passes, she begins to resent her husband's cranky, touchy, and irritable demands, and is tired of ''forcing her voice into a pleasant neutrality." She constantly admonishes herself for feeling like this, but she readily admits that she's just not the same person. She's tired and worried and no fun for anybody, and they're "not really husband and wife anymore, we're more house keeper, or even caregiver and care getter."

As Alan's illness continuing to wind itself around them greedily choking their marriage, salvation arrives in the shape of Delia Delaney. Delia is an absolutely gorgeous southern poet and essayist, a self confessed narcissist, who spends her life manipulating others to do her bidding, and who is hounded by almost constant migraines. While, Alan and Delia form an attachment and share inspiration from their pain and suffering. Delia's hunky husband Henry, finds a kindred strength of mind in Jane. Henry is a onetime poet turned freelance editor, but who has forsaken his own career to support Delia's.

Delia and Alan begin to have clandestine meetings in Delia's office, where Delia is able to reinvigorate Alan's stalled artistry. Only through Delia is Alan able to crawl out from under the heap of dirt and stones that his life had become, and dare to commit himself to art and love, persuading him to "see the clawing lizard in his back as not wholly evil." Meanwhile, Jane and Henry form a caregivers' society of two, meeting at the farmers' market, where they offer condolences to each other and commiserate over their beleaguered spouses.

Author Alison Lurie cleverly skewers contemporary marriage as she sets both couples up. Ideals eventually clash when both couples realize that their marriages are a sham, an affectation that was based on convention and security. The characters are forced to question their basic presumptions of romance and fidelity: Jane and Henry find each other because they are more down to earth, honest and practical, whereas, Alan and Delia are the tortured artistes, perfectly willing to sacrifice everything for the pursuit of their art.

Although Alan is never really free of his pain, he sees in Delia a fellow artistic soul, who never says she loves him or promises him anything, but makes him feel better whenever he sees her. There's no doubt that Jane loves Alan and does so much for him, but she makes him feel worse, whereas when he's with Delia, though his back still hurts, "it was as if the pain were beside him and not within him - an unwelcome companion, but not the devil torturing him."

The tone of Truth and Consequences is light, almost as though Laurie is intent upon writing a collegiate comedy of manners, a smart, and concise treatise on marriages gone wrong, but there some very real issues presented in this story, as the author weaves an intelligent and perceptive tale of pain and suffering, and the uneasy and often tortured battle for artistic enlightenment

For his part, Alan becomes so consumed with the ideal of Delia that he fails to analyze the attraction beyond her beauty and resistance. The consequence, however, is that Alan is eventually stimulated in his artistic endeavors by Delia's strange and manipulative dance. Her arrival in Corinth leads all the characters to ultimately reassess their own assumptions about their marriages and their lives. Mike Leonard December 05.