'Truth' is a pleasant, if slight, read
Truth and Consequences, By Alison Lurie, Viking, 240 pp., $24.95
If novels were food, Alison Lurie's ''Truth and Consequences" would be a cool glass of diet lemonade: tasty and a little tart going down, but leaving a slightly bitter taste and not much nutritive value in its wake.
The novel is set in the fictitious college town of Corinth, N.Y., site of Lurie's funny and successful 1974 novel, ''The War Between the Tates." And like its predecessor, this book is fundamentally a farce about marriage in academia -- a thin but glittering vein to mine.
Alan Mackenzie is a rising academic star, a world-renowned expert on 18th-century architecture who occupies an endowed chair at the college and is handsome and athletic to boot. Or was, that is. Since a volleyball mishap a couple of years earlier, Alan has been tormented by constant back pain, and has gradually turned into an overweight, cranky, narcotic-addled, constipated, impotent misanthrope.
The care and feeding of Alan have fallen to his wife, Jane, 12 years his junior. She is a pragmatic townie, as plebeian as Alan is refined, who decided early in life that being good would be her greatest accomplishment. But as any caregiver knows, it's hard to be saintly. She resents her husband's constant demands, is tired of ''forcing her voice into a pleasant neutrality," and berates herself for feeling this way. Even her job as administrative director of the Matthew Unger Center for the Humanities, or MUCH -- once a welcome diversion from her domestic assignment as Florence Nightingale -- is no longer a sanctuary now that Alan has been given a fellowship at the center for the year. And Alan, grateful for Jane's reliable care, nonetheless ''felt this gratitude as a weight."
This grim marriage of duty to resentment is primed for disruption, and it comes in the shape of Delia Delaney, the gauzy, gorgeous, migraine-prone author of ''Womenfaith (spiritual essays), Dreamworks (poetry), and Moon Tales (modern fairy stories)," and her husband, Henry, who finds a kindred spirit in Jane. Henry is a onetime poet turned freelance editor, a man who has settled on an anonymous vocation and a steadfast avocation of tending to Delia's many and highly specific needs.
Besides wealth, recognition, warmth, and security, Delia needs Alan's couch, Alan's office, and the adoration of Alan himself. She wins them by seductively fawning over his architectural follies, the drawings and constructions of miniature arches, fake ruins, and other functionless structures that, she tells him, reveal the soul of an artist.
While Delia and Alan share the inspiration born from pain and suffering (along with some discreetly described sexual practices that cater to their respective maladies), Jane and Henry form a caregivers' society of two, meeting at the farmers' market, where they commiserate. They also admire and lust after all that is earthy and not flighty in each other.
And that's the plot in a nutshell -- two narcissistic artists paired with two solid, reliable people who, to quote Bill Clinton, ''work hard and play by the rules." Ultimately, the characters are so slight that who leaves whom, when, and for whom don't really matter, and the satiric potential, so ripe at the outset, never develops into anything much more than a one-note shot at an easy target. But if you come to this book expecting little more than an ephemeral and so-dry-as-to-be-barely-discernible comedy, you won't be disappointed.
