Curriculum Vitae

By John Skow

THE WAR BETWEEN THE TATES by ALISON LURIE 372 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Nothing is more pleasurable than to sit in the shade, sip gin and contemplate other people's adulteries. While the wormy apple of marriage still lives, the novel will not die. And sure enough, in this summer-weight comedy of hanky-panky in a university town, the apple is a little mushy, but worm and novel are in the best of health.

As Mary McCarthy and Randall Jarrell discovered some time ago, a university is the ideal setting for a comedy of manners. After all, Jesuit seminaries and the U.S. Navy not excepted, the university is perhaps the only elaborate, rigidly mannered social unit left in the land.

Brian Tate, professor of government at Corinth University, is a brilliant, stuffy fellow, wickedly mocked by his own short stature. Wendy, a boneless counterculture chicken enrolled in one of his graduate courses, is unaccountably but irrevocably daft about him. He is flattered but sensible; 46-year-old professors do not (or should not) have affairs with students. Yet she clings, adores and listens in damp fascination to his explanations of foreign policy.

The professor, fond fellow, decides that "what he really ought to do [is] sleep with Wendy ... as soon as possible. She would see then that he was only a man like other men ... He didn't want to commit adultery, he told himself, but it was his duty."

Yes. Brian follows where duty leads, which is downward, to the linoleum floor of his office. But Wendy is not detached from her obsession. She flutters to the floor several times a week, like a napkin off a fat man's lap. When Brian is absent she writes rumbustious letters, one of which is intercepted by his beautiful, intelligent, talented and rather dull wife, 39-year-old Erica.

The author suffers a mild lapse of malice in her view of Erica, the only figure in the novel not drawn in caricature. She is less villainous, but also less interesting, than Brian, Wendy and the Tates' two loathsome teen-age children, and Novelist Lurie does not really see this. Still, Erica has her moments. She befriends Wendy, by now pregnant, and convinces herself that this mewling muddle of saber-toothed helplessness represents Woman Wronged. Nothing will do, she announces, but that Brian divorce her and marry Wendy. This is horror at its most gothic--an intermittently tolerable mistress about to be transformed into an utterly frightful wife, complete with infant--and Brian's soul is filled with dread.

Flummery. As poor Brian wriggles, and each new page takes a turn for the worse, the author pea-shoots expertly at all of the usual suburban targets. Even when the satire is forced, it is usually funny, as when the suet-brained Wendy tells Brian: "In a relationship you're just screwing the guy. In a meaningful relationship, you're screwing him and also he's your best friend."

The wife of a Cornell University English professor, Lurie has the manners and preoccupations of academic life close at hand. Her earlier books (The Nowhere City, Imaginary Friends, Real People) displayed something of the same shrewd realism combined with an interest in theoretical systems--The War Between the Tates is domestic conflict described in terms of power struggles, strategy and bargaining.

Claims of profundity and greatness are made for the author by her friends and are quoted on the dust jacket. They should be ignored. This is flummery, although of a very high order. So two-and-a-half cheers, at any rate, for Novelist Lurie. And Brian Tate for dean of women!

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