The War Between the Tates

by Alison Lurie

Erica Tate wouldn’t mind getting up in the morning if her children were less intolerable. Until puberty struck, Jeffrey and Matilda were absolute darlings, but in the last year, they have become sullen, insufferable little monsters. A forty-year-old housewife out of work and out of mind, she finds little happiness in the small college town of Corinth.

Erica’s husband, Brian, a political science professor, is so deeply immersed in university life—or more accurately in the legs of his mistress, a half-literate flower child named Wendy—that he either doesn’t notice his wife’s misery or simply doesn’t care. Worst of all, their pleasant little neighborhood is transforming into a subdivision. As new ranch houses spring up around their once idyllic home, Erica’s marriage inches closer to disaster.

When the Tate household tips into full-scale emotional combat, Erica must do her best to ensure that she comes out on top. In this darkly comic tale of a family at civil war, the National Book Award–shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs dives into the deterioration of a marriage.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author’s collection.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America, Classics, American

322 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 12, 1974

About the author

Alison Stewart Lurie was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.

Reviews

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lurie is a wonderfully good writer in the sense that she is a precise stylist -- and also very intelligent. The omniscient third person point of view is her typical narrative positioning, and it suits her well; there is something rather God-like (all-knowing, but detached) about the way she observes and depicts the flawed mortals who are her characters.

This is one of her best-known books. Set in the fictional university town of Corinth (New England, not quite Ivy League), it depicts the breakdown of a traditional marriage against the backdrop of the counter-culture of 1969. The marriage bits hold up very well, almost 30 years after the book was first published, the counter-culture bits less so.
Not exactly a feel-good book, but sharp insights and careful details in the Barbara Pym style. She is particularly good on academia, and I would especially recommend this book to anyone whose over-exposure to that strange world will make them likely to appreciate the joke.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am attracted to books set, like this one, in academia. I know that Alison Lurie was a long-time English professor at Cornell University, and I had read that Corinth, the college town in which the book is set, is a thinly disguised version of Ithaca, New York. Since I know Ithaca pretty well from family connections with both Cornell and Ithaca College, this was an attractive hook, and this aspect of the book didn’t disappoint me. Of course, it’s the Corinth/Ithaca of 1969 to 1970, so things have changed, but the overall feel of the town as Lurie describes it is still pretty accurate.

The novel tells the story of Brian and Erica Tate—he a political science professor at Corinth University and she a well-educated stay-at-home wife and mother. They’ve had a good marriage and a happy family, but now it’s all breaking down. Erica laments that their two children, now 15 and 13, respectively, have changed. She now thinks of them as “rude, coarse, selfish, insolent, nasty, brutish, and tall.” (The clever reference to Thomas Hobbes didn’t go unnoticed.) And of course, Erica is the one who bears the brunt of their uncivilized behavior. Brian goes to work in his ivory tower each day and can leave the domestic mess behind. He has always been a reliable and faithful husband. But Erica now learns that he has been having an affair with a graduate student.

And so the “war” begins. Although the Tates’ domestic troubles are common enough, Lurie succeeds admirably in describing the conflict both as unique to Erica and Brian and as part of the overall “battle of the sexes.” With the book’s title, she also alludes to the War Between the States, another war involving the breakup of a “family.” The Tates’ war is not unlike other wars: each side is sometimes on offense and sometimes on defense; the antagonists form alliances; they rely on intelligence, some of which is faulty.

Lurie has some sympathy for both Brian and Erica, and she is generally even-handed in her descriptions of them. But it’s clear that she’s on Erica’s side—as she should be, given that it’s Brian’s actions that precipitate the “war.” The book is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but at one point Lurie, maybe inadvertently, reveals her sympathies when she slips into the first-person “we” as she is talking about women’s superior ability to form and sustain friendships.

I enjoyed the book. Even though most of the characters are not particularly likable or admirable, their actions and emotions are in most cases true to life. The world has moved on in the almost 50 years since the book was published, and the late ‘60s zeitgeist of hippies, communes, Krishna bookshops, psychedelic seduction, and early-stage feminism seems a bit quaint. But maybe because the late ‘60s were my college days, that aspect of the book was nostalgic for me. And stylistically, Lurie is a wonderful writer.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1974, the story is definitely a period-piece. It's entertaining, although none of the characters is particularly likable and I didn't find it as hilarious as reviewers seemed to. It was pleasant and kept me reasonably interested.

[Anni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another stroll down Memory Lane with a novel I read 25 years ago and which lingers in my mind as a very enjoyable read. Re-acquainting myself with this (admittedly cliched) story of marital infidelity has reminded me what a bloody good writer Alison Lurie was.

The novel is an easy one to confuse with that of a similar title and theme: The War of the Roses, adapted for film and starring Michael Douglas and played for laughs (which is Michael Douglas’s forte, IMO). But this one has its own more subtle delights.

I enjoy reading about the dated mores and attitudes of my youth from the advantageous aspect of later years and wisdom – it shows how far we have come in sexual equality. The ‘Me too’ generation would be quite appalled!

[Kaethe]

Well, that's a relief. So lately I've been on a non-fiction binge, snarfing down everything by and about Edward Gorey. And the biography mentioned his close friendship with Alison Lurie, who wrote Foreign Affairs (a book I never had any interest in reading despite having a lovely copy on my shelves for twenty or thirty years). So I was looking up Alison Lurie who also wrote The War Between the Tates, and then I was kicking myself for not having realized that this author who wrote that one book I really loved that was made into a movie I really loved had written a book left sitting on my shelf for lo, these many years until I finally donated it to the Friends of the Library book sale.
So I requested a copy from the library and this evening I sat down with it all ready for a blackly comic tale fondly recalled.
And after a hundred pages or so I was just fed up and kind of disgusted when I got to the whole bit about the professor having an affair with the student who was so hopelessly in love with him for so long (wow, it's hard to believe that scenario would be anything less than squicky ever, just ew!) and oh, crivens, this must have been written after Lurie's divorce and it is so much nastier and meaner and devoid of empathy and humor than I remembered. So I could cast it aside with no regrets but a lot of amazement that I could possibly have enjoyed reading this book in 84-85.

Huh, so the movie came out in '89. I just assumed I had picked up the book when the movie was pending or just out, but whatever. Adler. The screenplay was by Adler. Based on his very successful novel.

Oh. Nevermind. The War of the Roses was based on The War of the Roses not The War Between the Tates. Why had I gotten that idea?Where had I gotten that idea? Why didn't I check? That one's easy: I didn't check because I knew. Had anyone asked I would have placed my certainty pretty high, too, because I remembered reading the book.

Well, this is just all kinds of relief, because I really was hating this Tate novel and I couldn't believe I remembered it so differently, but of course it was awful if I was comparing it to another totally different book. And I really did like Lurie on children's literature quite a bit and I was kind of sorry that I had tried rereading a book and had it backfire so disastrously.

So yay, now I get to take another crack at the War of the Roses and there's another one about the Children, and my memory was both better and worse than I had thought, but that's true of pretty much everything as one gets older. And I can carry on liking Lurie on children's books and just pretend that this evening never happened.

And now I'm going to go cross post this on The War Between the Tates so that in thirty years or so when I start wondering what it was about Lurie I can refresh my memory.

Library copy

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a fan of humorous novels about academia, I've wanted to read this novel for a while. It was written in 1974 and the action takes place in a loosely disguised Ithaca, New York in 1969 when people are attending "rap sessions" and beginning to talk about the oppression of women. Some of it, particularly the language, feels very quaint. Could there really have been a time when a Krishna Bookshop would upset people? But some of it is timeless. Conflicts in gender roles are hardly dated or quaint; they are enduring themes.

I thought the novel would be funnier. It's actually quite sad. But there is a priceless chapter where Lurie explains how academics tend to live out their specialities in how they behave. And there is a protest that results in a scene worthy of Richard Russo's Straight Man. Pure hilarity. So it stands up as an academic farce, but with more sadness and loss than I expected.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite type of book. A campus novel, written in the early 1970's and set in 1969. The protagonists are a couple in their 40's watching as as a rapidly changing world comes literally to their doorstep (in the form a new subdivision being built right at the edge of their vintage farmhouse. But things get worse as the husband has an affair with a hippie student, and the war is on! This is a wonderful time capsule of that turbulent times -- anti-war protests, astrologers, an uneasy foray into abortion politics. But at the heart a story about the people at the center and how a marriage endures through changing times.

[Elaine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really just couldn't get on with this at this time. Had absolutely no pull to continue reading. The characters are unlikable (which isn't normally a bad thing for me) and it simply didn't seem to be going anywhere.

Wrong book wrong time for this one I feel.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is the perfect example of slapstick tragedy."Bryan is teaching foreign policy but he's not making it!" But Bryan, a professor of U.S. foreign policy with a wife and two kids is making it---in 1968 with a female coed; a hippie avatar girl who happens to be the descendant of a Revolutionary War hero and is now pregnant.with his child See a pattern here? 1968: the year of the Tet offensive in Viet Nam, the counterculture and America at war with itself over civil rights. The marriage of Bryan and Jessica Tate is a mirror held up to that other War Between the States; the one that took place at the end of the Sixties. THE WAR BETWEEN THE TATES is not a satire of academia but of a whole country gone mad and frustrated at its inability to accomplish anything or hold itself together. The dialogue is priceless. When Erica finds love letters from the hippie girl written to her husband she screams out, "You did it in your office? Bryan, you don't even have a couch in your office!" Erica's revenge on Bryan (read the United States) is to force him to marry the girl, thus completing the cycle of history from the American Revolution to the Viet Nam War. Bryan is now compelled to marry a girl (the principles for which the American Revolution was fought) that he no longer loves. THE WAR BETWEEN THE TATES is funny, sad, and grotesquely ludicrous, just like America at the end of empire.

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though I hated everyone in this, I didn’t hate the book itself. Not one of Lurie’s best, but even a second-rate Lurie is better than a lot of stuff.

I appreciated the dramatization of the struggle with family planning prior to Roe v. Wade. Horrible quandary for everyone involved.

Also, there is a scene that a post-MeToo reader will parse as a rape but the characters treat it like just the typical end of a bad date. 😬

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the tradition of Great American Novels (i.e. failing marriages in the 'burbs), Lurie's story is a sniggering--yet fair-minded--dispatch from the front lines of a household in the throws of an adultery-spurred civil war. Although written and set in the social upheaval of the early '70s, the novel's attention to emotional and social nuance makes for a more universal account of relationship tensions, foibles, and redemption between cuckold and mistress, between parents and children, and between husband and wife. This was a pleasure to read--and an insight into the complicated emotional mindsets of those on all sides of a mid-life infidelity.

[Colette Guerin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up at Goodwill remembering reading Alison Lurie many years ago, plus it was a first edition and I always like having those no matter the value. A good read. Much of it is very dated now but I have to say I enjoyed that part about it too.

[Hella Bella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Guilty pleasure paradise -- a cheap, bitchy novel that trashes the hippies, bashes the teenagers, and worships the long-suffering housewives of the world. I was rooting for Wendy all the way!

[Carla]

Well, I love campus novels. Lurie’s fluid writing, her sharp social satire (which, like most satire, does date rather quickly) and her subtle observations definitely suited me. Also, if her ending is not happy, it is not gloomy either; and I wished the warring Tates well.

[Jane Juliette Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book starts off with an enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges quote - right; then the reader is thrown instantly into a domestic drama: a mother, Erica, is left alone with her "rude, coarse, selfish, insolent, nasty, brutish and tall" children at breakfast. Ok, this frigid and snobby U.S. housewife doesn't like her teenage children - fair enough, but soon things get worse when Erica finds out her college professor husband has a young and pretty stupid student, Wendy. Erica burns cookies while reading a letter from Wendy to her husband.

"Slowly, methodically, she refolds the letter and replaces it in
its envelope. There is a peculiar burning odour in the room, like explosives. For a moment Erica thinks she is having a hallucination.
Then she opens the oven door: at once the ktichen fills with smoke
and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookied. The war has begun."

Reading this together with the Borges quote I thought 'Wow, now the oedipal tragedy can unfold', but unfortunately the burnt cookie scene
is the most dramatic part of the whole novel.

Another letter from Wendy that comes later in the story is another of my personal highlights in this book. Because for me, Wendy is a beautiful chubby-cheeked angel. She writes this letter to Brian, Wendy's adulturous husband whom she motivates to write.

"I was going to disappear silently like WHOOSH away Soil and Toil on the TV only I was afraid thaf I did you might have somedoubts later and get racked up which would be a bad development because the whole idea is for Brian Not T Be Hassled, to be always more and more calm and productive and together -as much as anybody can be in this American Century – granted that.

And to finish your book which will be a beautiful child
for you and the world.

I want to say besides, think of me some cold afternoons
in your office but I know that's an ego trip. Don'T think
of me just remember how important what you are writing
is and now nothing can get between you and it any more.
And take care of yourself.
Yoursyoursyoursyoursyours"

"And to finish your book which will be a beautiful child for you and
the world" - I love this sentence, as well as the precise astrology in the book (Cancers always make a big scene, so you stay?) and the extraterrestrial sex on acid.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read pre-20th century novels, I enjoy learning about tea cups and carriages and primogeniture. With equal pleasure, I've just read a novel about a less distant time when people made coffee in a pot over a hot flame, abortions were illegal and everyone read their horoscope. Welcome to 1974 and "The War Between the Tates". It's about a family divorcing - the parents from each other, the kids from the parents and the parents from the kids. (No, they are not the same thing.) It is a finely observed novel about the manner and mode of family. The mother misses the young incarnation of her teen kids whom she now despises and watches the woman she sees in the mirror grow more and more powerless each day. The father decides that he can take the kids in limited doses and that there's no good reason why he can't have a wife and a mistress. The wife complains about the financial power and freedom that men have, but at the same time considers men who don't have money or who don't exploit that power as unworthy of her. The wife is more aware than Betty Draper is, but not by much. She is more discontent and more free, but still doesn't see that she is part of her own problem. (I wonder if I would have seen it had I read this in the seventies.)
The plaint of the 40 year old, upper-middle class, American divorcee may seem pedestrian. But in the hands of the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alison Lurie, this book becomes a folk song for the women who become wise well after the choices that define their lives have been made.
Some critics say that the description of the college setting and the discussion of social issues don't hold up well. I disagree. She is writing in the near aftermath of the 60's. With our 2017 ears we should listen to how a contemporaneous author heard it. The sounds of the the disconnect between the establishment's love of drink versus the youth's worship of pot, the fringe, the new age book stores and the call of California communes - it is all here.
Recommended for people who like "the way we live now" types of novels like "Freedom" or novels about the older female condition - like "Mrs. Dalloway", "Wife" or "Olive Kitteridge".




B

[MargaretDH · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was definitely of it's time. I loved Lurie's Foreign Affairs, and I was hoping for more of the same, but this didn't connect for me in the same way. Some of what she had to say about academia was funny, and she really knows how to portray the faintly ridiculous. But the characters were disagreeable in an unappealing (rather than compelling) way, and I just wasn't pulled in.

If you're looking for a zeitgeisty novel from the early 70s about upper middle class sexual, gender and marital politics, this is for you! I'm glad I read it, because it's always interesting to be so deep in the cultural mindset of another time, but I had to push myself through the last third.

[Beatrice Gormley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An immensely entertaining story of a marriage falling apart, set in academia during the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was the big national issue and all the standard cultural rules seemed up for grabs. Alison Lurie manages to be wickedly truthful but still compassionate toward her characters. I thought this was one of her best books, and deserves to be a classic.

[Karolinaantonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. Plus it's fun to read about a university that is so obviously Cornell. The vet school professor is particularly funny.

[Deb Oestreicher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tedious and unpleasant. I could not get through it. Maybe it is dated. I liked another book of Lurie's, Foreign Affairs.

[David]

Ultimately a disappointing novel in that the ending is close to Republican. Jeff always asks about the prose, so I'll focus on that for a bit.

If I knew nothing about the author, I would have imagined that she was educated in England and then came to the United States around the beginning of the 1960s, settling somewhere in upstate New York. Her prose is not 'fast'; the narrative unfolds with many recursive reconsiderations, rooted right in the sentence variation as well as in the plot itself. The books that I have read are primarily from the 1960s, and I did find the much later one a more fluid reading experience. The obsessions of 1969-era USA inform much of the earlier work (or are anticipated in the early 60s books), hence a lot of references to 'hippy' diction and style weave through the work, as well as a post-Chatterley gentle pushing against the limits of the vulgar. Most of Lurie's characters are about my parents' age, and that, most of all, I find difficult to engage; I suspect it is the USA-ness of their experience that seems most alien to me, especially as a lot of the university-related material seems not radically different from my own career in university. Lurie uses dialogue effectively, and switches 3rd-person limited focus to show the same/similar moments from more than one perspective. I like it more than not, though at the same time I would not imagine her a popular novelist, not attractive to a wide reading audience.

[J. Lee Hazlett · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. A smart book, full of exactly the sort of references you'd expect Ivy League-educated characters to make. This story does an excellent job of portraying the complicated socio-political shifts of the late 1960s and how those changes affected the day-to-day lives of individuals from housewives to grad students to New Age drifters. The turmoil of the period is palpable in the actions and reactions of the protagonists, and the reader is left feeling a bit shell-shocked at the end, as if they really have just witnessed a war.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd actually give this 3 1/2 stars. Alison Lurie does a great job of both capturing and lampooning the ethos of academic life in the early 1970s. Some of the descriptions of the main characters' perception of their relationships with each other and their children are laugh-out-loud funny. Unfortunately, as noted in other reviews, this ends up making most of the characters fairly unlikeable and a couple are mere caricatures. It also could have used an editor with a firmer hand. Nonetheless, it's a spirited portrayal of the battle of the sexes with some interesting insights about human nature that are relevant for today.

[natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suppose I better leave off reading Alison Lurie for a while before a become a proper man-hater.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this: Lurie is a sharp writer and made me laugh out loud on several occasions. But the way the book is described in the blurb is entirely misleading. The Tates don't - and never did - have a perfect marriage; the fracture lines are clearly visible from the start. Nor - as the puffs on my very old copy suggest - is this an equal-handed book. Neither character is particularly likable; but they are not equally monstrous. Erica is uptight and self-sacrificing at most; Brian is predatory and occasionally threatening. Changing gender politics play into this of course, and while Lurie's voice may feel very modern, the plot is sometimes confounding - Danielle marries Kotelchuck? - and ultimately skewed my enjoyment of the book.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best Alison Lurie book I've ever read, but still entertaining. Although I am not sure if it's a good thing that I didn't realize I'd read this before until I got to page 281. And I am also not sure what it says about me that these are the lines that triggered my memory: "Brian hugs her back; but he cannot help noting the physical contrast, and wondering why, for the second time in his life, he has become involved with a relatively flat-chested woman. It is not as if he preferred small breasts. But his life is not over yet."

One last note: This book contains a very amusing psychedelic love scene.

[Poornima Vijayan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's no other author I've read with such consistent joy as I've read Alison Lurie.

She writes amidst what she knows best- college townships. You'd think there's only so much that can happen there and perhaps she's covered it all. But that's where Alison Lurie's genius crops up. The college is just the backdrop. The many characters and the million shades of grey they have- is kind ever really kind without motive? How important is it that you look good to yourself in the mirror you hold? There's so much she touches upon in this apparently light novel.

If you haven't read Alison Lurie, you are missing out.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel jumps out of the gate like gangbusters, with crackling narrative, incisive wit, and hilarious descriptions that echo Lucky Jim or Pnin. However, the plot bogs down about two thirds the way through and, while showing signs of life towards the end, eventually sputters to a close, a la TS Eliot, not with a bang, but with a whimper. It is a shame, for Ms. Lurie's observations throughout are spot on, but that is the risk one takes when neither of the Tates are particularly likeable.

[Flexanimous · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I believe there is still a great deal of inequality in the world, I am very happy to live now, and never more so than when I read books like this one. Alison Lurie describes a stultifying pre-feminist world, with a lead character who has subsumed herself completely in her children, her home and her husband. When she realises her kids no longer need or even like her, and her husband is having an affair, she is forced to confront the hollowness of her domestic fantasy.

[abigayl marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

genuinely one of the best books i've ever read. any author who has ever written a pretentious book with a prestigious college professor as a character wishes they could write a book this good. Lurie effortlessly flaunts her knowledge and actually invites you to engage in her allusions, rather than just force a huge stilted-thesaurus-fueled wedge between the work and the reader

feminist must read tbh