![]() The resulting splinters reveal the real nature of the personal material. In each case, their carefully‐constructed lives and self‐images, glowing with conscious enlightenment, break up on the rocks of the irrational, to which they have been lured by the siren song of sheer sexual energy. Miss Lurie's protagonists are always academics or writers well‐read and well‐controlled, thoughtful and successful, people of good taste-and hence people especially susceptible to the Call of the Wild and the perfectly rational processes of self‐deception. Miss Lurie has been working steadily toward “The War Between the Tates.” I have not read her first book, “Love and Friendship" the other three are all variations on the same theme and the same device for bringing it to life. “The War Between the Tates” is a novel not only to read, but to reread for its cool and revealing mastery of a social epoch something “light and bright and sparkling,” in Reuben Brower's phrase for “Pride and Prejudice" a near‐perfect comedy of manners and morals to put on the shelf next to “Vanity Fair” or “The Egoist.” ![]() In her fifth book, with the effortless grace of a real ironic gift, she has raised The Way We Live Now into the Human Comedy. For 10 years, Alison Lurie has regularly produced insightful and witty novels about The Way We Live Now, drawing on a large talent for social verisimilitude.
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