Volume 31, Number 15 · October 11, 1984
International Episodes
By Gabriele Annan
Foreign Affairs
by Alison Lurie
Random House, 320 pp., $15.95
The ghost of Henry James hovers over this novel and materializes from time to time. 'The idea that he has fallen into a Henry James novel occurs to Fred' and to the reader too. The fable is Jamesian: against a background of alluring, repellent London society a sophisticated American learns from an unsophisticated one that, contrary to appearances, true goodness exists and matters more than beauty, wit, or grace. But if the fable is Jamesian, the explicit yet ironic way it is told suggests a much-abbreviated George Eliot; and so does the author's irrepressible dislike for her attractive anti-heroine, Lady Rosemary Radley, a modern cross between Gwendolen Harleth and Rosamond Vincy.
Review, 2300 words
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