As I said, obscure.
Anyhow, this book reminded me of that passing thought, for its characters - middle-upper class university academics and their wives in a secluded New England university town, some time in the 1950s (as far as I could gather) - are just the sorts to utter such words. Take this passage, for example:
Feeling rebuked, Emmy removed herself. This time she went upstairs and began to straighten out Freddy's closet. All I have to do to keep Mrs Rabbage quiet is to insult her now and then, Emmy thought to herself, and she gave the kind of cheerful laugh that might be supposed to go with this kind of cheer, but she did not care for it. She was chagrined to think that she had spoken rudely to a servant.
Or this one:
'Hateful thing,' Miranda said, kicking the stove. 'And do you know, when we first moved in here I was completely enchanted with it. Oh, lord!' She snatched the coffee-pot up just as it boiled over. 'I'm so sorry. That just shows you. Do you still want some?'
One interesting thing about Lurie's writing - apparent in that first passage - is that she writes, self-consciously or otherwise, in much the same voice as that adopted by her characters ('but she did not care for it'). In part, this is because the narrative voice is almost exclusively that of one or the other of the characters (that is, it's presented as the thoughts of one of the characters - in conventional third person prose, though, rather than Joycean stream of consciousness), sometimes in the form of letters. There's an amusing little digression in there somewhere in which Holman reflects that Emmy's use of intensifiers ('perfectly horrid', 'terribly thoughtful', etc) actually indicates a diminution of feeling/opinion - I wonder whether that's an entirely fair appraisal, though (not that Lurie necessarily endorses Holton's p.o.v., etc, etc). Much use made of adverbs in general, sometimes as qualifiers ('rather delightful'). (These examples aren't actually from the book itself, but they might as well be.)
So, the milieu is academia (university lecturers and administrators; not students except at the margins) in a very particular time and place, mostly the humanities - not a microcosm for the rest of the world because, as one of the characters notes, all of the violence and irrationality has been abstracted (besides, most of the world doesn't make passing references to Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hobbes, classical mythology, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and so on in casual conversation), but still a fascinating study, at least for me.
Focuses on the little intrigues and maneuvers (both academic and personal), and the petty and major disasters (again, across both dimensions) of the town's inhabitants, tracking them through dinner parties, faculty meetings, clandestine encounters in parks, chance run-ins at supermarkets. Social dynamics strongly determined by class and other traditional indicia of social status, filtered through and inseparable from the university hierarchy. Cast of nouveau riches, frightfully well-bred old money types, 'picturesque' (Lurie's description not mine, and a good one) arty semi-bohemian types, drifting musicians, struggling young instructors, boorish/feared senior professors, inept and mildly corrupt administrators, and their wives (who are very much active subjects in their own right) and children. Much time spent on the merits and otherwise of the divisive 'Humanities C' course. In some faint way, put me in mind of The Great Gatsby. Often very amusing, albeit more in a 'wry smile' than 'laugh out loud' way.
All of which should be more than enough to explain why I like this book so much.
* * *
Something was wrong with the game, though. 'But they're all blindfolded!' Emmy objected.
'Yes,' Miranda said. 'They like it better that way.'
