The War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie

First published: 1974

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: 1969-1970

Locale: Upstate New York and New York City

Principal Characters:

• Brian Tate, a professor of political science
• Erica Tate, Brian’s wife
• Wendy Gahaghan, a graduate student with whom Brian has an affair
• Danielle Zimmern, Erica’s best friend, a French instructor at Brian’s university and a divorcee
• Zed, a 1960’s dropout, the proprietor of the Krishna Bookshop, and a longtime admirer of Erica

The Novel

The war between the Tates is fought on two fronts simultaneously. The less-destructive engagements are the skirmishes between two generations—Brian and Erica Tate and their two, young, teenage children, Jeffrey and Matilda. The once adorable Muffy and Jeffo have become coarse and insolent, “awful lodgers—lodgers who paid no rent, whose lease could not be terminated.” Their wickedness takes the usual forms: a preoccupation with loud music, a sulky intransigence when faced with any request from their parents, and flamboyant impulses in dress and grooming.

Yet as these generational conflicts work themselves out—a land mine here, a mortar burst there—armed combat of the deadliest kind is being waged in the marital trenches between Brian and Erica. The battle is set off by an old tactic: the ambush of a middle-aged man by a much younger woman. Brian, a professor of political science at Corinth University, is working hard on a scholarly book when Wendy Gahaghan, a slightly soiled flower child, insistently presents herself to him as a romantic sacrifice to what she perceives as his genius and goodness. Once their affair is in full flush, Erica is quick to find out. The Tates at first effect a nervous truce, but Erica’s dramatic discovery that Wendy is pregnant leads to Brian’s banishment to an apartment. The pregnancy is aborted, but the hostilities continue.

During her separation, Erica leans on her friend Danielle Zimmern, already divorced from her English-professor husband and thoroughly embittered by her own marital wars. Yet when Danielle meets Bernie Kotelchuk, a congenial veterinarian, she relents somewhat, and she provides Erica with a useful model of sexual generosity.

Kotelchuk, hearty and masculine, is contrasted with Sanford Finkelstein, who goes simply by Zed. Erica had known Zed years before at Harvard, and she is delighted to find him running the Krishna Bookshop in Corinth, drawn there apparently by his unexpressed feeling for Erica. Zed is a gaunt, balding guru to Wendy and many of her friends. His passivity and yearning attract Erica’s sympathy, leading her to an offering of herself to Zed that ends comically but sadly.

While Danielle is enjoying her new lover, Bernie, and Erica is experimenting with Zed, Brian is savoring the mixed pleasures of life with Wendy and her militant, doping student cohorts in the struggle for women’s liberation on the Corinth campus. The dissidents focus their anger on Don Dibble, a conservative professor of political science whom Brian dislikes intensely. In a facetious moment, Brian suggests that the agitators take Dibble hostage in his office and is appalled when they do exactly that. The interlude ends quickly with Brian’s absurd rescue of the hapless Dibble by means of a rope that Brian smuggles into Dibble’s office and then hangs out of his window. In a comic conclusion, Brian is beaten for his treachery by the irate girls whom he has deceived.

Brian’s next blow is his discovery that Wendy is pregnant again, but this time there is a complication: The father may be—probably is—a Pakistani graduate student in engineering. The force of Wendy’s obsession with Brian is now spent, and the frazzled Brian is ready to give her up when she announces she is leaving for a “far-out commune” in Northern California. The pregnant Wendy departs with a new friend, Ralph, who she says “really digs kids” and “wants to work out a total relationship.” Zed leaves Corinth at about the same time, and the battle-scarred Tates are left to their own devices. The war ends with a promising settlement in sight and the hope that, though the Tates may not live happily ever after, they will perhaps comfort each other in their joint struggle to be honest, decent people.

The Characters

Brian Tate, forty-six years old, holds an endowed chair in his department and has written two scholarly studies and a textbook, but “he is a dissatisfied and disappointed man.” With a long line of accomplished ancestors, he has felt the need to be successful but has not attained the deanship that he covets. All of his worldly efforts have been colored by his awareness of being only five feet five—and “all his adult life Brian had behaved so as to compensate for, even confute, the sign set on him by fate.” He has become, in fact, a dull man, a man whose self-discipline has led him to a dead end. Although his conjugal life has not always been perhaps as complete as his fancies have led him to dream, he has enjoyed a contented married life and has never exploited his students sexually. He has had his invitations and turned them down, scorning the weakness of colleagues who have fallen. “He loved Erica, and he had serious work to do.”

So although it is hard to admire Brian Tate, it is easy to sympathize with him in his misery. He certainly gets little profound satisfaction from his misalliance with Wendy. A middle-aged student of George Kennan and American foreign policy cannot be expected to find a gratifying way of life in the company of young rebels passing around joints and cliches about the establishment. He is at the end of the novel a chastened man, “embarrassed and ashamed of his behavior over the past year.”

For Erica Tate, the discovery of Brian’s affair is a crushing shock. Erica has always expected Brian to be a great man in his field, interpreting his solemnity and humorlessness as evidence of high seriousness. Even as time runs out and the greatness fails to materialize, she remains Brian’s devoted helpmate. Besides her husband, she has the sacred Children to whom to devote her life. She is a traditionalist, basically conservative in her social, sexual, and cultural values, attitudes, and styles. Facing up to the transmogrification of dear Muffy and Jeffo into teenagers is difficult enough, and Brian’s infidelity leaves her reeling.

It is typical of Erica that she treats Wendy with great kindness when she turns up sick and pregnant at Erica’s door. When she renews her old friendship with Zed, she offers him herself. She fulfills herself in nurturing others: The great man she marries, the children, pregnant mistresses, and forlorn Zen dropouts—all elicit her care and mothering.

Erica’s fastidiousness contrasts with her friend Danielle’s open earthiness and hearty tolerance of the world and its imperfections. The two women complement each other well: “Women age like wild apples, Erica read once. Most, fallen under the tree and ungathered, gradually soften and bulge and go brown and rotten; and that is what will happen to Danielle. Others hang on to the branch, where they wither and shrink and freeze as winter comes on. That is how it will be with her.”

Little needs to be said about Wendy. Full of earnest goodwill but heedless, prey to the appeal of every radical slogan, warm but shallow, compassionate but often rancorous and lacking in charity, she and her friends left a lot of clutter behind them in the 1960’s for other people to pick up, but their energy and idealism often worked for the good. Wendy herself is no leader, but she swells the rout led by shriller voices. In her intellectual shiftlessness she will find it hard to set a stable course, but she does not know this. Her innocence is implausible but beguiling: “I know there’ve been some bad vibes, but I’ve got my head together now, and everything’s going to work out.”

Critical Context

The War Between the Tates, Lurie’s fifth novel, is generally regarded as her best. Among her earlier novels, the best known is The Nowhere City (1965), an Easterner’s satiric look at life in Southern California. She followed The War Between the Tates with Only Children (1979) and Foreign Affairs (1984), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. As befits a novelist of manners, she has also published a wide-ranging study of dress, The Language of Clothes (1981).

In The War Between the Tates, all of Lurie’s strengths as a novelist are readily apparent. She writes sharp, convincing dialogue and moves her narrative with well-conceived scenes. All of her technical ability serves a broad, generous vision of the human situation; her intelligent grasp of what prompts her characters to behave as they do is matched by her charity toward them. Although she is sensitive to women’s concerns, she does not write mainly to dramatize women’s problems and could not be called a feminist, nor does she make of the novel a vehicle for political propaganda.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. “Miss American Pie.” Spectator 232 (June 29, 1974): 807. Praise for The War Between the Tates from a British critic. Ackroyd plays down the significance of the novel’s background in the troubled Vietnam years and emphasizes its comic elements in the vein of James Thurber.

Aldridge, John W. “How Good Is Alison Lurie?” Commentary 59 (January, 1975): 79-81. Aldridge faults Lurie for what he sees as a trivial approach to academic life. This article is one of the more authoritative negative judgments on Lurie’s work.

Costa, Richard H. Alison Lurie. New York: Twayne, 1992. Costa provides a critical and interpretive study of Lurie with a close reading of her major works, which includes a chapter devoted to The War Between the Tates, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Cowen, Rachel B. “The Bore Between the Tates.” Ms. 4 (January, 1975): 41-42. This is a strong feminist reading. Cowen argues that Erica Tate should have aligned herself with the women revolutionaries and used the whole episode of Brian’s affair as an occasion to grow as a woman.

Helfand, Michael S. “The Dialectic of Self and Community in Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 3 (November, 1977): 65-70. Helfand’s major interest in The War Between the Tates is the political commentary that he identifies. Brian Tate’s interest in the foreign policy doctrines of George Kennan helps Helfand to understand some of the problems of modern liberalism.

Newman, Judie. “Alison Lurie: A Bibliography, 1945-1989.” Bulletin of Bibliography 49 (June, 1992): 109-114. A useful bibliography of Lurie’s writings.

Pearlman, Mickey. “A Bibliography of Writings About Alison Lurie.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. A listing of secondary writings on Lurie’s works and career.

Pearlman, Mickey. “A Bibliography of Writings by Alison Lurie.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. A listing of writings by Lurie.

Rogers, Katharine M. “Alison Lurie: The Uses of Adultery.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. An excellent broad treatment of adultery and its significance in women’s lives. All of Lurie’s novels through Foreign Affairs are analyzed.