Miss American pie

Peter Ackroyd

The War Between The Tates Alison Lurie (Heinemann £2.50) Holiday Stanley Middleton (Hutchinson £2.75) The ironic elision in the title of Miss Lurie's latest conceit is only the first inkling of its small scale; it is, you might say, a mockHomeric battle between frogs and mice since the intelligent lady has a fastidiousness which reduces small events to miniature. This fits quite neatly with the romance of her suburban heroes, and I was relieved that there were thin walls between me and their ungainliness. At the centre of this War in which anything can happen and generally doesn't is Erica

-rate, mother of brats and spouse of a professor, Who no longer enjoys ,being herself. She has

sleep-walked her way into 1969 and now America has suddenly become like a coat that has grown too large. Her status as a profes sional nerve-end is confirmed by Professor Brian Tate who behaves as if he were in a novel by having an affair with Wendy, a hippy student who lives from mouth to mouth. His Pot and bellied lust merely confirms Erica's suspicion that she is always "in the right"— a happy delusion from which even her best friends, a professional divorcée known fetchingly as Danielle and an ex-hippy known as Zed, the alpha and omega of feeble-min dedness, will not awake her. Any decent novelist Would relish the Prospect of such unpleasant protagonists, and Miss Lurie wields a relentless prose which it is More than a duty to read. It is a pleasure. She

has a solid appreciation of the richness of her• own intentions, and both style and construction are realised with a strength and tact that remind one of the finest excesses of the early nineteenth century. With a-judicious avid

ironic use of perspective .two or three voices are able to come back to haunt both them

selves and the narrative, and if is not the merest coincidence,that The War Between

The Tates should concern itself with the hiatus between the perceptions of each Character, that variation which is enough to make and unmake different worlds or what 8rian Tate would call "spheres of influence" in the interminable book on the Cold War Which he is writing throughout the novel, an Internal anology which speaks volumes in the downfall of Erica's sovereign state.

The main distinction to be made is not, of eourse, between fictive monad and fictive

monad but between'us' (Lurie, me and Presumably you) and 'them,' the doomed %urbanites. The authoress is so invisible that you see her everywhere, her interven

tions couched in a discreet present tense Which is the literary equivalent of pursed lips: I see,' Erica remarks, rinsing two pieces of lettuce in the sink under an unnecessarily

hard flow of water." A pretty heavy number, this Miss Lurie. She allows herself an ironic cThniscience, as if she were telling a fairytOry, in which a number of incredibly complicated tasks (how to get through flother day) and apparently impossible sittiations (a meeting of 'Women For Human quality Now') are spread out for our delectation. t, And as the net of her prose, transparent Protagonists it is, slowly begins to tighten the Protagonists are seen to be the breathless and hausted creatures which they always were.

'Ilan Tate is strangled by his own pride and Erica duped by her self-righteousness and they both, naturally, live happily ever after. The hippies and other friends who have littered the narrative drift into their respective false paradises, consisting of liberal — I mean radical — doses of marriage and California, Zed becomes fool or Fool, an ambiguity which is unfortunately allowed to continue. (I have a suspicion that Miss Lurie is too intelligent to reject any style as merely ludicrous — a weakness which a little robust emotionalism would cure). What The War Between the Tates has done is to derive intellectual comedy out of a war between ages and sexes that owes more to Thurber than it does to international politics and the 'urban situation.' It defies contemporary America with lucidity and with charm.

When we return to more native climes, any doubts about the modern English novel are confirmed by reading Stanley Middleton's Holiday. As the title suggests, it is an exercise in Butlin pastoral, evoking the particularly sticky and mundane sadness which English Vacations suggest — the world of hymns, pubs and family joints which is familiar to anyone who listens to the radio. But behind all of these clichés lurks something real, if not quite alive: Edwin Fisher, lecturer in the philosophy of education, is paddling by the edge of an empty sea. I don't know where novelists dig up these meagre characters (one never meets them in real life) but, once they've dusted off the mould and put them on show, the light begins to wither them with commendable efficiency.

Edwin, to add soap-opera to tragedy, is in the process of abandoning his wife. The end of an affair is even more prOate and uninteresting than its beginning, and it must be said that any character who has anything whatsoever to do with 'love' is necessarily going to appear ludicrous. Love is the most conventional of human situations, and only a madman or a poet can ring any changes; poor Mr Middleton is only a novelist, and he is left helplessly nursing the cliche. Edwin and erstwhile spouse are seen falling head over heels in a tea-shop while talking about Ibsen. Well, let's be kind. Middleton, let's say, repeats little scenes and miniscule emotions with a well-meaning but clumsy verisimilitude which leaves nothing at all to the imagination. My test is the quality of the dialogue. In Holiday it is self-consciously mimetic, and therefore flat and stale. There is an iron rule here which novelists would do well to follow: the more assiduously you try to make conversations appear varied, informative and entertaining (obeying every rule in whatever handbook writers carry around) the more factitious they will become. Conversations consist of cliché and formal signs which only a very astute novelist will be able to recognise;if they seem too interesting, they will read as heavily as lead and be almost as common.

It seems in last week's column I criticised Boy by Christine de Rivoyre (Hamish Hamilton £2.75) too soon. This boring and vulgar book is not to be published for another week or so. I have already apologised to the nice lady from the publishers, and I can only urge you yet again not to read it when it does eventually fall upon the market.

Peter Ackroyd is Literary Editc—

Spectator