This one won a Pulitzer, which is kind of interesting given that its America - and American characters - are seen primarily in connexion with England and their dealings with the mother country. Anyway, like Love & Friendship, it's an absolute breeze and a delight to read. In terms of characters, Foreign Affairs is basically a two-hander - there's Vinnie Miner, an Anglophile professor in children's playground rhymes, 50ish, plain, and dogged (literally) by an imagined demon familiar who represents self-pity, embodied in the form of a dog (which, incidentally, makes a heck of an opening line for the novel: 'On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog'), and Fred Turner, a youngish PhD specialising in the poetry of 18th century author John Gay and who, in stark contrast to Professor Miner, is blessed with movie star good looks. Colleagues but only slightly acquainted at a NY university, their paths cross when their work brings each to London.
What follows is a sharp, keenly observed kind of modern comedy of academic manners, intersecting with tv stars, publishing types, business magnates, social hostesses and general gads about town, in a round of drinks parties, weekends away, and fabulous lunches. Characters are thrown into deepest dudgeon by unfavourable reviews of their work, frustrated half to death by working conditions at public libraries, dwell incessantly on their relations with one another, continually condescend to those who they consider beneath them in the most well-mannered way possible, &c.
Then, too, there's what one reviewer (on the book's back cover) refers to as the novel's 'merciful vision', which is a great way of characterising the sympathy with which Lurie renders her characters and their movements...I could never develop a 'reader's crush' on any of them, but I do often feel the urge to give them a big hug and some (sure to be disregarded) advice. Some of the minor characters aren't as well developed as they could be, but perhaps that comes somewhat with the territory, and at least one never feels that they're mere archetypes or mouthpieces for particular points of view. Henry James is a good reference point (suitably updated, of course, and perhaps somewhat less intricately drawn - though this, too, may be appropriate to the times); indeed, Lurie explicitly refers to James at a couple of points in Foreign Affairs.
Of all the stuff that I've read this holiday so far (and it's been a pretty voracious period), Lurie's are the books which have been the most purely pleasurable, I reckon.
