Alison Lurie Publishes Her Tenth Novel -- Her First in 10 Years
FOR RELEASE: July 14, 1998
Contact: Paul Cody
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ITHACA, N.Y. -- "At three a.m. on a windy late-November night, Jenny Walker woke in her historic house in an historic New England town, and sensed from the slope of her mattress and the chill of the flowered percale sheets that Willie Walker, the world-famous writer and naturalist, was not in bed beside her."
So begins Cornell University English Professor Alison Lurie's most recent novel, The Last Resort (Henry Holt 1998), her first novel in a decade and the 10th of her career. In a single opening sentence -- deft, graceful, subtle, packed with meaning -- Lurie puts the world of her novel, its terms and stakes, into rapid motion. A chilly marriage bed, an absent husband, a worried wife, set in a historic house and town, on decorous flowered sheets, late in the year, just before winter.
The Walkers' May-September marriage, after 24 years, may be less than perfect. Jenny could be tiring of her role as the ever-helpful wife, Wilkie is depressed and even contemplating insomnia. They'll rent a house in Key West, Fla., for the winter. Enter a lesbian B&B owner who Jenny begins to fall for, a poet, a drooling Wilkie fan and animal hugger and her detestable mother.
Let the high Lurie comedy begin.
"It's been much too long since Lurie's last novel," said Publisher's Weekly in a starred review, calling The Last Resort "entertainment that is at once highly intelligent and mildly edifying."
Lurie graduated from Radcliffe College, joined the faculty at Cornell in 1968 and is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature. She won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Foreign Affairs, has written several well-received non-fiction books, including The Language of Clothes, a collection of essays on children's literature, Don't Tell the Grownups, and edited The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales.
She has won fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations and, along with the Cornell English Department's A.R. Ammons, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Lurie, who divides her time between Ithaca, Key West and London, officially retired from Cornell this summer, though she will continue to teach an occasional course, including English 277 "Folklore and Literature" this fall.
In a 1982 essay in The New York Review of Books, Lurie wrote about her childhood and her early interest in writing. "By the time I was 8 or 9 it was my belief that I would be an ugly old maid, the card in the pack that everyone tried to get rid of." But something consoled her. "Making up stories was fun. With a pencil and paper I could revise the world. I could move mountains; I could fly over Westchester at night in a winged clothes basket; I could call up a brown-and-white-spotted milk-giving dragon to eat the neighbor who had told me and my sister not to walk through her field and bother her cows."
After years of rejection, her third novel, and first to be published,Love and Friendship, came out in 1962. "One can read Lurie," said the writer Joyce Carol Oates, "as one might read Jane Austen, with continual delight."
"Alison Lurie has been a popular and devoted teacher of courses on creative writing, children's literature, literature and folklore and the reading of fiction, as well as an inspiration to aspiring writers," said English Department Chair Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor of English. "Having a brilliant satirist in the department is never completely comfortable, of course; we professorial types sometimes worry that we might be satirized in a sequel to The War Between the Tates, but she has treated us with great forbearance and chosen other targets."
Of her new novel, Lurie said, "It's about retirement and enforced leisure and what it's like to live in a resort town. It's also about age and change and renewal and the knowledge of death. I write about people my own age and am aware of the changes men and women go through in their lives, the selves they leave behind."
Then Lurie added, "Even in my first novel, where everyone was in their 20s, they had pasts, childhoods. But as you get older, the past becomes longer and heavier."
By the end of The Last Resort, Jenny Walker finds herself in a world where she is not a solitary woman on chilly flowered sheets but is in a warm place, with someone she loves, among real flowers -- where "the frangipani put out their pink and white and golden velvet whorls of petals, and the poinciana explode slowly overhead in drifts of scarlet confetti." She has earned her glowing world.
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