|
New & Current Releases
Archives: A-Z By Title
Archives: A-Z By Author
Advanced Search
All-Time High Scores
Best Of 2006
Best Of 2005
Best Of 2004
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Books In Our Forums
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed books.
|
Truth And Consequences
A Novel
by Alison Lurie
This satire from Pulitzer Prize-winning author finds members of the faculty and staff of an Ivy League college engaging in mid-life extracurricular activities.
Viking, 240 pages
10/06/2005
$24.95
ISBN: 0670034398
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
Lurie is wickedly entertaining as she mocks everything from the ego of the artist to the bossiness of the meek, and everyone lives happily ever after. [1 Sep 2005, p. 65]
Daily Telegraph Anne Chisholm
In this novel, her 10th, [Lurie] takes on the grim but universal subject of chronic illness, and quietly undermines the pious hope that suffering necessarily brings out the best in us. Around this unpromising theme she constructs a sparkling and beautifully balanced tale of happiness lost and found.
Library Journal Leann Restaino
Engrossing and wonderfully written, this novel would make a good book club selection. [1 Aug 2005, p. 69]
Los Angeles Times Merle Rubin
Though Lurie may lack the profundity of Austen and Pym--and the social and intellectual acuity of her fellow American satirist Mary McCarthy--she is nonetheless a writer well worth cherishing for giving us novels that are as gracefully edifying as they are incontrovertibly entertaining. [30 Oct 2005, p. R9]
New York Review Of Books Cathleen Schine
For all its sardonic look at human frailty, Truth and Consequences is a buoyant and optimistic book.
The Guardian Rachel Cooke
Truth and Consequences is a deeply pleasurable page-turner.
The Independent Wendy Brandmark
Alison Lurie's latestnovel of academic manners and morals is a farce with serious intentions. There may be an adulterous husband hiding behind a curtain, but through his transformation, Lurie poses weighty questions about illness, art and love.
The New Yorker
The inevitable happens, and, thanks to Lurie's psychological acuity, so does much that wasn't inevitable.
The Spectator Penelope Lively
This novel is perhaps slighter than its predecessors. But it is equally mordant and entertaining, and wonderfully expansive about a time, a place, and the corrosive effect of selfishness.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Terri Apter
However adept we are at telling lies, Alison Lurie will be around to satisfy our need for fictional truth.
Washington Post Frances Tallaferro
"Truth and Consequences" is a more autumnal book than its famous predecessor, but the author's satiric gifts are undiminished.
Bookslut Beth Dugan
This is a quiet story about real people in a place that is imaginable, but what Lurie asks the reader to do is look at themselves and extrapolate this story onto their lives.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
The story motors along smoothly on sheer professional craft. The result isn't a terribly original or memorable novel, but a pleasant enough read nonetheless.
The New York Times Book Review Alice Truax
The trouble with "Truth and Consequences" isn't its predictability... but its length. It's much too short.
Boston Globe Julie Wittes Schlack
If novels were food, Alison Lurie's ''Truth and Consequences" would be a cool glass of diet lemonade: tasty and a little tart going down, but leaving a slightly bitter taste and not much nutritive value in its wake.
The Guardian Lucy Ellmann
Lurie can lapse into a methodical, even mechanical, way of writing that makes you feel, as the reader, that you're boring her. But she carries through to the end somehow, and at times achieves real darkness.
Kirkus Reviews
A tepid affair by an author capable of incandescence. [15 Jul 2005, p. 758]
Publishers Weekly
Lurie, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs is everything this isn't, doesn't seem much interested in fleshing out her characters' romps.
San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
Despite its wonderful title, "Truth and Consequences" is not Lurie at her best: It is Lurie at her most repetitive and least subtle.
 The average user rating for this book is 0.0 (out of 10) based on 0 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Discuss this book in our forums |
|
GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer | Metacritic | MP3.com | TV.com
