Customer Reviews

The War Between the Tates

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This novel seems to be out of print again and is hard to find even in second hand stores. This is a shame because the breakup of the marriage of the prim professor Brian and his wife Erica is a fine and subtly humorous novel. The novel is set in the Vietnam era as a background to the campus setting, but it is also is part of the atmosphere that leads to a seachange in the lives of all the characters.

Brian passively allows himself to be drawn into an cheesy, self serving affair with a nubile student. One of the novels digs at colleges of the sixties is that the girl is barely literate, which is apparently no impediment to being a graduate student.

Erica, who has been a demure and dutiful wife has an intellect as sharp as her professor husband She is less than happy with the situation, but is determined to put Brain's feet to the fire on this issue. She also finds that with Brian out of the house she is able to deal with the many annoyances imposed on her by her prissy spouse, such as his insistence that she does not work on campus.

Less pleasant are her two teen children who are cleverly likened to the South Vietnamese of the day, dependant for aid on people they resent and her weedy, weird college friend Sandy, the only male available to spend time with her. Lurie's description of events are smart, satirical and just plain funny. Most importantly this is novel about change and the need and the inevitablity of moving forward.

This was the first novel by Alison Lurie that I've read and it made a deep impression. It is very witty and humorous as are all her works but it is among the darkest. It's fine enough to have gotten the Pulitzer except that the direction of the author's sarcasm would, I imagine, be a downer for the prize-determiners. Happily Foreign Affairs, which got the Pulitzer, directs its sarcasm more across the board, for instannce at the interactions between Brits and Americans; this time the fact that the two protagonists are English professors is evidently forgivable.

All her fiction is interesting, but here is what I like best, aside from the two aforementioned novels: The Truth About Lorin Jones, The Nowhere City, Imaginary Friends.

The first half of this book shows a horribly plausible example of a middle aged marriage falling apart at the seams, due to chance happenings. The psychology of the husband, Brian Tate, is thoroughly and sympathetically examined - he looks like a success, but his own self-view is very different. This, and the great feeling of the palce and period (1969) are the strengths of this novel.

Its weaknesses are that it gets less convincing towards the end, and the author's rather simplistic femanism gets the better of her, particularly when pontificating on male relationships.

Overall, not one of her best, but still a good read.

This is my favorite novel by Lurie. I love Alison Lurie because she is a genius at studying the psychology of her characters. In this book, both Tates are dissected and their thoughts analyzed, verbalized and explained to full clarity, and this makes them so easy to understand, and therefore to love or hate. My favorite part of the whole book is when Erica starts measuring the pros and cons of something in her head. Lurie is so structured in her analysis, it's almost impossible not to follow her thread. Moreover, this novel analyzes the disintegration of a marriage, and the dynamics and motivations are so universal and so timeless that they can be applied to the 60's or to the 00's alike.

I read this book when I was fifteen, and I was appalled at the heavy-handed way Lurie heaps scorn on virtually ALL the characters. Hippies, academics, and housewives, all seem to rate as easy joke material for her, but she never explains why. I also felt that she comes across as callous and self-righteous in the way she gloats over all the misery her make believe people suffer. If you read a classic like DEAD SOULS by Gogol you see some mean, petty people -- but Gogol doesn't laugh at them for suffering, only for being foolish. Lurie doesn't get how satire works.

Getting to the specifics -- a reviewer above made an interesting point. Given that Erica Tate is described (over and over) as a stunning beauty, it is awfully odd that when Brian leaves her the only man she can find to hang out with is uber-dweeb Zed. This guy makes Woody Allen look like Bruce Willis! Similarly, Professor Brian Tate is such a pompous little twerp that it's difficult to imagine even the most depraved and lustful hippie chick throwing herself at him.

Lurie knows less than nothing about the Sixties youth culture she intends to "satirize." At one point Brian catches his daughter listening to a "Stones record" and the chorus of the song supposedly goes "awah gotcha BOOM BOOM!"

Listen to every Stones album from "England's Newest Hit Makers" to "Get Yer Ya Ya's Out" and you will never find this song. Why couldn't the lady have done some homework? Either that or taken five seconds to make up a pretend rock group, perhaps with an oh-so-clever "satirical" name like the Ugly Brutes or something?

Another problem, given that Wendy is supposed to be a nubile hippie chick, and Brian a staid professor, the sex scenes should have been a lot steamier than they were. All things considered, Lurie totally underestimated the hippy generation, its staying power, determination, and so forth. The Stones are still rolling, thirty years later, but no one is reading this book.

Awah gotcha BOOM BOOM!

This book is awful. The characters are one-dimensional, have no self-knowledge whatsoever, and are unbelievably stereotypical. It's not badly written, but it's pointless, depressing, and it's hard to figure out what it all means. Just a bad idea. It's also very badly dated.