TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. By Alison Lurie. 224pp. Chatto and Windus. Pounds
15.99. - 0 7011 7891 4. US: Viking. $24.95. - 0 670 03439 8
The title of Alison Lurie's new novel, Truth and Consequences, is not a warning but an observation: truth, whether spoken or concealed, embraced or denied, has an impact on human life. In Lurie's fictional world, minor accidents, human foibles and commonplace coincidences are no less forceful than tragic fate. A sports injury turns the gracious and good-natured husband Jane Mackenzie loves into an overweight, irritable bore, unable to work. Alan Mackenzie's interpersonal world shifts alignment along with his backbone. He is drawn to those similarly preoccupied with physical discomfort and its possible remedies; above all, he is drawn to a woman who sees his suffering as a creative force, and, like his forebear Brian in The War between the Tates, he embarks on a self-serving, self-destructive affair.
Truth and Consequences is a campus novel, and events follow the academic cycle, with autumn representing a new year and an influx of new people. Personal crises are informed by doubts familiar to the scholar. "What if I am unable to finish this work?", and "If I do finish and publish this work, will anyone really care?"
Alan asks himself. In the wolf hour, the mirror reflects a "hysterical aging loser", who sulks because the work which gains the greatest attention in the outside world is treated by his colleagues as amusing but trivial. The academic's obsession with minute differences in status informs the characters and their relationships.
The central issues of loyalty and stability competing with terror of futility and mortality stretch well beyond any ivory tower, however. As in her previous novels, Alison Lurie's excellence resides in her readings of ordinary human paradoxes and ironies, particularly, here, in her revelation that being cared for can be as tedious as providing care. Alan barks his continual demands on his wife with an air of entitlement, and times his requests to maximize their disruptive effects.
He emerges as both impossibly annoying and deserving of sympathy. Jane, driven by duty and paralysed by revulsion, is shown to be both necessary and useless to her husband.
Novelists are quick to relish the inconsistencies of human attachment, and often signal this with a character's visual response. For ex- ample, after meeting her soon-to-be-lover, Anna Karenina sees her husband at the station and, for the first time, notices his ridiculous ears. So, when Jane Mackenzie fails to recognize as her husband the stout elderly man emerging gingerly from a taxi, we know, long before any infidelity occurs, that adultery is in the air. With changing affections come lies, and Lurie delicately but ruthlessly captures the myriad of lies that are aimed at preserving a relationship. Jane mutters, "I understand", "That's all right" and "I don't mind", in the vain hope of avoiding the consequences of the truth that she does mind this endless servicing of her invalid husband. The chilly deception of such caring tropes is effectively portrayed; but the writing becomes plodding when Lurie tackles the interior monologue directly: "How can I mind doing things for Alan or think such mean selfish thoughts when I am well and he is in pain -when I promised to love and cherish him?" Jane wonders. Lurie has many strengths, but depicting clashing desires and the need to see oneself as a good enough person are not among them.
Lurie's exposure of folly and self-deception borders on the bleak, but she invariably interposes some gentle mundane image that sustains the humour and warmth of her fictional world. Jane's love for her husband may be dead, and Alan may be bemused as to how he could have once felt desire for his wife, but a ham sandwich, carefully covered in transparent wrap, a plump quarter pickle resting beside it, catches hold of the sweet durability and banality of human care. Nor does Alan's despair dominate the plot: determined to throw himself from the window, he is impeded by a warped frame which he can open only by two inches.
