Review

Book: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
Pages: 280
Finished: October 2009

Challenges:

** Pulitzer Prize ** Fall Into Reading ** Read and Review**

First Sentence: " On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog."



This book was great, even if it was slow going for me. I think my biggest struggle with it was the size of the print--which made it hard for me to just pick up for short bursts of reading. Unfortunately I became engrossed in this novel right as I entered the busiest 2 weeks of my year so I only had short bursts of reading time available.
This is a book of manners, and England, and Americans, and sex, and most of all love--not only for the young male lead, but especially for the middle aged female lead character. I can see why this witty and ironic book won the Pulitzer. I am so glad I found this one and read it.




From Amazon:
Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children’s 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 Vinnie’s 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 Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece.