Foreign Affairs

Vinnie Miner's self-pity is literalized as Fido, an imaginary, needy, dirty-white dog that grows or shrinks with her mood and that she must keep refusing to let in. Her surprise affair with Chuck Mumpson — loud, unsophisticated, exactly the kind of American tourist her carefully cultivated Anglophilia is designed to look down on — undoes her sense of herself as someone whose refined taste in England has earned her a kind of honorary Englishness. Chuck's own project, tracking down his English ancestral village, mirrors Vinnie's: both are constructing a fiction of belonging to a country that owes neither of them anything, and Lurie treats that mutual self-invention with more tenderness than the novel's satirical opening chapters lead you to expect.

Fred Turner's parallel plot with the glamorous actress Rosemary Radley is built to look like the real romance and the real England — beautiful, well-connected, effortlessly charming — and Lurie spends the whole book quietly inverting that hierarchy. Rosemary's charm turns out to mask alcoholism and a instability that surfaces, devastatingly, when Fred discovers she has an entire hidden persona as a working-class cleaning woman she becomes when drunk enough to lose her grip on the performance of gentility. Vinnie's unglamorous, class-crossing affair, which she spends the whole book being faintly embarrassed by, is the one that turns out to be sincere.

Vinnie is a scholar of children's literature and a career Anglophile whose research trip to London is itself an act of cultural cosplay — she has modeled her manners, her taste, even her self-image on the comedy-of-manners novelists she studies. Lurie, herself a career academic, is merciless and precise about this type: the American scholar who mistakes fluency in a country's literature for citizenship in its actual social world, and who discovers, too late to be comfortable about it, how much of that fluency was always performance rather than belonging.

The title works on both registers the novel actually runs on: diplomatic foreign affairs, the polite fiction of nations getting along, and the more private, more embarrassing kind that Vinnie and Fred are each conducting. Lurie keeps the two meanings in constant, quiet friction — an academic conference on Anglo-American relations sits in the same book as two love affairs that are themselves miniature negotiations between two countries' worth of manners, expectations, and self-image, and the comedy comes from watching characters mistake the diplomatic register for the personal one and vice versa.