Truth and Consequences
A Novel
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A masterful blend of love, adultery, and academia where love and consequences collide.
Jane is a widow facing unexpected encounters, and Alan, a man grappling with his own demons. As his condition deteriorates, the couple's relationship becomes increasingly strained. Jane finds herself overwhelmed by the demands of caring for Alan, feeling more like an employee than a devoted wife. The intimacy they once shared is replaced by caution and frustration, as Jane grapples with her own feelings of resentment and guilt.
Alan seeks solace from someone else in the understanding of his artistic struggles while grappling with feelings of inadequacy and guilt over his failing marriage. They experience confrontations and revelations that force them both to confront their choices and the emotional toll of their circumstances.
Lurie poignantly captures their internal struggles, revealing how illness reshapes identities and connections.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lurie's various academic romances, set against the backdrop of a thinly veiled Cornell University, point in a straight line to tragicomic double-think relationship writers like Lorrie Moore. This latest foray begins promisingly: Jane MacKenzie fails to recognize her own husband, Alan, as he approaches their house from a distance, so bent and changed is he by his aching back. He's an architecture professor (expert on Victoriana); she's a university administrator. When visiting poet Delia Delaney takes up residence, it's Jane who has to attend to her diva-like demands, while simultaneously trying to cope with an incapacitated Alan. Once he's up and around, though, sexy and selfish Delia toys with, then seduces him. The affair gives Alan a midlife lift, and, on discovery, gives Jane a reason to leave him, perhaps for Henry, Delia's ombudsman husband and Jane's highly organized mirror-image. The problem is that Lurie, whose Pulitzer Prize winning Foreign Affairs is everything this isn't, doesn't seem much interested in fleshing out her characters' romps. Remedial repetitions of basic facts, character descriptions and plot points throughout give the proceedings a strangely clinical feel, as if her characters' reactions were too base to engage with fully: they are reported almost dutifully, though not without offhand flashes of crackly brilliance. 5-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
Superficial story
Not convincing, normally her books have depth, not this one.