Nom de Plume

There are certain women writers that I lump together in my mind because of a certain sensibility they share: Margaret Atwood. Carol Shields. Anne Tyler. To this list, I add Alison Lurie, a writer who in my opinion doesn’t get enough credit. Many of her real killers are dated, often set in the sixties and seventies, with old-fashioned “hip” dialogue and some social constructs that the modern woman may not have a lot of patience with, or even sympathy for. Nonetheless, her stories still whiz along, and she brings a deep sympathy to her characters.

The Nowhere City was another of my Barnes and Noble freebies–remaindered reprints of a book originally published in 1965. Paul and Katherine Cattleman move to Los Angeles from the academic world of New England. He has failed to get a teaching position, and takes a year-long job as a historian for a large corporation. Katherine is unhappy about moving to LA, reacting against the city’s fakeness with acute sinusitis.

Paul is not a faithful husband; he never has been and feels no guilt about it. And the things Katherine hates about LA–the sense of not having a history, not being real–are the very things he loves. He enters into a deep affair with a “beatnik” who lives in the slum of Venice (in itself interesting to me, because the landmarks described are familiar to me, but it’s a different world from the gentrified Venice Beach of today).

Yet Katherine embarks on her own journey, complete with an affair with a psychiatrist who is estranged from his starlet wife. Lurie captures the arc of the Cattlemans’ marriage through Katherine and Paul’s affairs with others—and the person who is ultimately changed by the California experience is Katherine; she who hates LA comes to embrace it wholeheartedly, while he who loves it–at least at first–is the one who remains static. I loved that the unhappy wife is the person for whom vistas open.

Lurie also captures the essence of LA as I remember it: artificial, lacking in history, a place where normal arbiters of taste and morals are somehow placed in abeyance. I can’t remember everything I’ve read by Lurie, except for The War of the Tates. This was a much better book. And I’ve got another of hers to read, so stay tuned.