Author:Michael Bracewell
The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of Perfect Tense is a man broken on the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine, the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life' - the narrator scrutinises the arcane of his environment like an urban anthropologist, looking for aesthetic or spiritual purpose and finding only print-outs and suspension files, spider plants and yuccas and polystyrene cups. In this short, brilliant novel, we are taken on a terrifyingly familiar tour of office life which is at once hilarious and profound - the comedy of recognition matched by deepening urban anxiety, as if TS Eliot had been blessed with Groucho Marx's comic timing. One man's unravelling philosophical crisis amid the leaving parties and sandwiches becomes, in the hands of Michael Bracewell, a metaphysical search for order and purpose deep in the back of a desk drawer.
I devoured the book at a sitting and then went back for a second dip at once
—— Penelope Lively , Sunday TelegraphIf you’re coming to Lurie for the first time, you must begin with the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs
—— Rachel Cooke , GuardianLurie...has quietly but surely established herself as one of this country's most able and witty novelists
—— New York Times (1984)Perhaps more shocking than she knows - shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet
—— Christopher IsherwoodIn Foreign Affairs no detail lacks its special piquancy. And none can be savored without leaving you with a mouthful of barbed hooks
—— New York TimesShe has a capacity in her novels for noting the little vanities and foibles, the revealing mannerisms and contradictions in human social behaviour, which often reminds one of Austen
—— David LodgeIf you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them
—— USA TodayAn ingenious, touching book
—— NewsweekA flawless jewel
—— Philadelphia InquirerForeign Affairs is probably Alison Lurie’s best novel to date, certainly it is a triumph, and much of its success stems from its accomplished plotting. Lurie has known from the first how to tell a story brilliantly through the consciousness of a woman who in type and circumstance resembles the author herself
—— Marilyn Butler , London Review of BooksThe first chapter is one of the most captivating in any recent novel I have read
—— New York Review of BooksLurie weaves a characteristically sharp-eyed, deftly ironic comedy of cultural collisions and collusions that rightly won her comparisons to Henry James and Edith Wharton
—— Sunday TimesI am convinced that Alison Lurie's fiction will long outlast that of many currently more fashionable names. There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy over the years. Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton
—— John Fowles , Sunday TimesA brilliant novel - her best I think. The book is a triumph, and not simply of style...Foreign Affairs is witty, acerbic, and sometimes fiendishly clever
—— Paul Bailey , Evening StandardWarm, clever and funny
—— Times Literary Supplement
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