Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs
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Foreign Affairs: summary, description and annotation
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about childrens folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.Also in London is Vinnies colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to. Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Luries Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece. A splendid comedy, very bright, brilliantly written in a confident and original manner. The best book by one of our finest writers. Elizabeth HardwickThere is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy. . . . Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton.John FowlesIf you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them.USA TodayAn ingenious, touching book.NewsweekA flawless jewel.Philadelphia Inquirer
Alison Lurie: author's other books
Who wrote Foreign Affairs? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie
Vinnie Jones
Fred Kaplan
Richard Wilbur
H. W. Brands
G. W. Choudhury
Saddam Hussein
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Brenda Gayle Plummer
Alison R. Bernstein
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Vinnie Miner, 54-year-old Anglophile professor, is in London on a six-month foundation grant. So is her young colleague, Fred Turner. Vinnie is plain and resignedly self-reliant; Fred is arrestingly handsome and moping after a breakup with his wife. Vinnie and Fred have love affairs in London. Freds is a fraught liaison with an actress, while Vinnie drifts into a relationship with an engineer from Oklahoma she met on the plane, a brash uneducated stereotype American who finally beguiles her (and the reader) with his uncomplicated goodness... I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once
Penelope Lively, Sunday Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Lurie is Professor of American Literature at Cornell University. Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and The Truth About Lorin Jones won the Prix Femina Etranger in 1989.
ALSO BY ALISON LURIE
The Nowhere City
Imaginary Friends
Real People
Only Children
The Truth About Lorin Jones
Love and Friendship
The War Between the Tates
The last Resort
Women and Ghosts
V.R. Lang: Poems and Plays. With a memoir by Alison Lurie
The Language of Clothes
Dont Tell the Grownups: Subversive Childrens Literature
Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales
Fabulous Beasts
The Heavenly Zoo
FOREIGN AFFAIRSAlison Lurie This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Epub ISBN: 9781446425534
Version 1.10
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 1998
Copyright Alison Lurie 1984
The right of Alison Lurie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in Great Britain by
Michael Joseph 1985
Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780749397937
For Diane Johnson
As I walked by myself
And talked to myself,
Myself said unto me,
Look to thyself,
Take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee.
Old song
O N a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog. The womans name is Virginia Miner: she is fifty-four years old, small, plain, and unmarriedthe sort of person that no one ever notices, though she is an Ivy League college professor who has published several books and has a well-established reputation in the expanding field of childrens literature.
The dog that is trailing Vinnie, visible only to her imagination, is her familiar demon or demon familiar, known to her privately as Fido and representing self-pity. She visualizes him as a medium-sized dirty-white long-haired mutt, mainly Welsh terrier: sometimes trailing her silently, at other times whining and panting and nipping at her heels; when bolder, dashing round in circles trying to trip her up, or at least get her to stoop down so that he may rush at her, knock her to the ground, and cover her with sloppy kisses. Vinnie knows very well that Fido wants to get onto the plane with her, but she hopes to leave him behind, as she has successfully done on other trips abroad. Recent events, however, and the projected length of her stay, make this unlikely.
Vinnie is leaving today for six months in England on a foundation grant. There, under her professional name of V. A. Miner, she will continue her study of the folk-rhymes of schoolchildren. She has made this journey a number of times, and through a process of trial and error reduced its expense and discomfort to a minimum. She always chooses a daytime charter flight, preferring those on which no films are shown. If she could afford it, she would pay the regular fare so as to avoid boarding delays (she has already stood in various lines for nearly an hour); but that would be foolishly extravagant. Her grant is small, and she will have to watch expenses carefully as it is.
Though patience is held to be a virtue most appropriate to women, especially aging women, Vinnie has always particularly disliked waiting for anything, and never does so if it can be avoided. Now, for instance, she elbows her way deftly past less experienced passengers who are searching for their seat numbers or are encumbered with excess luggage or with children, excusing herself in a thin pleasant voice. By crossing through the galley to the far aisle and back again between two rows of seats, she outflanks a massed confusion of obvious rubes with carry-on bags labeled SUN TOURS . In less time than it takes to read this paragraph she has made her way to a window seat near an exit in the nonsmoking section, pausing only to extract the London Times and British Vogue from a magazine rack. (Once the plane is airborne, the stewardess will distribute periodicals to all the passengers, but those Vinnie prefers may vanish before they reach her.)
Following her usual procedure, Vinnie slides into her place and unzips her boots. In stocking feet she climbs onto the seat and opens the overhead locker; since she is barely over five feet tall, this is the only way she can reach it. She removes two pillows and a loose-woven blue blanket, which she drops onto the center seat beside her handbag and her British periodicals, thus tacitly claiming this space ifas is likely in midweek and mid-Februaryit hasnt been assigned to anyone. Then she arranges her worn wool-lined raincoat, her floppy beige felt hat, and her amber-and-beige Liberty-print wool shawl in the locker, in such a way that only the rudest of fellow passengers will attempt to encroach upon them. She slams the locker shut with some difficulty, and sits down. She stows her boots under her own seat along with a carton of duty-free Bristol Cream sherry, and puts on a pair of folding slippers. She arranges one pillow beside her head and wedges the other between her hip and the arm of the chair. Finally she smooths her crisply cut graying hair, leans back, and with a sigh fastens the seatbelt across her tan wool sweater and skirt.
A disinterested observer, Vinnie is quite aware, might well consider these maneuvers and condemn her as self-concerned and grasping. In this culture, where energy and egotism are rewarded in the young and good-looking, plain aging women are supposed to be self-effacing, uncomplainingto take up as little space and breathe as little air as possible. All very well, she thinks, if you travel with someone dear to you or at least familiar: someone who will help you stow away your coat, tuck a pillow behind your head, find you a newspaperor if you choose, converse with you.
But what of those who travel alone? Why should Vinnie Miner, whose comfort has been disregarded by others for most of her adult life, disregard her own comfort? Why should she allow her coat, hat, and belongings to be crushed by the coats and hats and belongings of younger, larger, handsomer persons? Why should she sit alone for seven or eight hours, pillowless and chilled, reading an outdated copy of
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