Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 09 Nov 2016

Women and Ghosts by Alison Lurie

I’ve always been a little surprised that I like the work of the Chicago born Alison Lurie quite so much. If I was asked to characterise the kind of books I’m usually drawn to, novels of manners and relationships don’t feature high on my list – and almost all critical appreciations of Lurie start off with the observation that she’s a master of that form. However, at some time in the late 80s I read The Truth About Lorin Jones, a delicious dissection of New York bohemianism, and I was completely bowled over.

Six years or so after publishing Lorin Jones Lurie followed it up with Women and Ghosts, a collection of nine short stories held together with a common theme – but whether that theme is the intervention of the supernatural or psychological disturbance is left to the reader to decide. The writing is light and deft and there is an ever-present sense of playfulness or wry humour running through each story. There’s a distinct touch of the Twilight Zone or Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected about one or two the tales but you can almost feel Lurie’s cunning smile spreading across the melodramatic prose.

Women and their obsessions, social anxieties, relationship concerns and social dissonances sit at the heart of all of the stories and it is these that generate the ghosts, strange coincidences and breakdowns that stalk the pages. In Fat People, for example, a couple, Scott and Ellie, are separated when he goes on a business trip to India. As a way of staying connected they resolve to trim themselves down and lose weight while they are apart. However, his absence triggers a huge wave of anxiety in Ellie and she starts to see fat people everywhere, food talks to her, she fails at every diet and soon the whole town is full of menacing fat people stalking her, drawing her into more and more gluttony.

In The Double Poet a middle aged poet starts to believe that someone is impersonating her, slowly trying to take over her life. Her poetry readings start going catastrophically wrong, she leaves her post as poet in residence at a university and she obsesses over ‘coincidences’ and reports of her being in two places at once. Her final breakdown is public, spectacular and inevitable and the only cure she find to the presence of this double is to give up her career as a poet and revert from her pen name to her real name.

In other stories a woman is haunted and menaced by a piece of furniture that wants to spend its time in a museum, a woman is stalked by the spectre of a young girl she saw killed by a car on Halloween and a man turns into a sheep. All of them beautifully crafted and complete in themselves but when added together they have the cumulative effect of creating a collection that can almost be read as an episodic novel.

Alison Lurie’s profile and reputation as a novelist has not kept pace with contemporaries like Margaret Atwood and I think that is a shame – she is a stylist of some substance and this collection demonstrates how versatile she can be.

The book is still in print and paperback copies are easily available and quite cheap. A nice UK first edition hardback can also be found for not much more than £10.

Terry Potter

November 2016