Volume 21, Number 13 · August 8, 1974
The Way We Live Now
By Roger Sale
The War Between the Tates
by Alison Lurie
Random House, 372 pp., $6.95
Truman Capote, on the back of The War Between the Tates, says Jane Austen would enjoy this novel; the author, Alison Lurie, is called the Queen Herod of modern fiction by Gore Vidal, and the wisest woman in America by James Merrill. Which is the kind of press Lurie has been getting for a decade. Yet if the suggestion is that her work is spicy, wicked, wise in a feline way, it is really the wrong suggestion. The War Between the Tates is Alison Lurie's fifth novel, her longest and most ambitious, yet it is a sober, witty, modest book, like all her others, better perhaps, very touching in places, no 'break-through,' for her or for fiction.
Review, 2141 words
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