Only Children

"Only Children" is unusual among Alison Lurie's work in that, whereas most of her other novels have a contemporary setting, it is a period piece set in 1935. Like "Real People" it describes a group of people spending a midsummer break in a rural retreat in the north-eastern USA. Anna King, the headmistress of "Eastwind", a progressive school, has invited two couples, the parents of two of her pupils, to spend a long weekend with her at her farmhouse in upstate New York. The two nine-year-old girls, Mary Ann Hubbard and Lolly Zimmern (the future Lorin Jones of "The Truth About...."), are the best of friends. Relations between the adults, however, are more complex. At the beginning of the novel, Mary Ann's parents Bill and Honey, Lolly's parents Dan and Celia, and Anna do indeed seem friendly. Anna has invited the two families to stay with her in the hope that Bill will agree to serve on Eastwind's board of governors where his financial and administrative expertise will be greatly valued. (He is a senior Government bureaucrat). As the book progresses, however, we learn that Dan Zimmern and Honey Hubbard are conducting an adulterous affair with one another; Celia has her suspicions but Bill seems blithely unaware of his wife's infidelity. We also learn that, some fifteen years earlier, Dan and Anna were lovers and that he still harbours hopes of renewing their relationship. The title "Only Children" has two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to Mary Ann and Lolly, both of whom are the only children of their parents' marriages, although Lolly has an older half-brother Leonard from her father's first marriage. (Leonard Zimmern- in adult life a prominent literary critic- is a character who appears in a number of Lurie's novels. He appears here as a moody, truculent teenager reluctantly spending a holiday with his father, stepmother and kid sister, but does not play an important part in the story). On the other hand, the title also refers to the four parents, who are "only children" in the sense that they behave childishly, with frequent petty squabbles breaking out. Each of them is childish in his or her own way. Dan, a successful advertising executive, is a handsome but irresponsible playboy. Honey is a spoilt Southern belle used to getting her own way. They are in many ways similar in character, so their attraction to one another is understandable, especially as neither Celia nor Bill makes a particularly attractive partner. Celia, a weak, insipid woman, is Dan's second wife and, like many second wives, is haunted by the thought that her husband will treat her in the same way as he treated his first. Bill is a dry, dull man and a compulsive workaholic (he spends most of the weekend break poring over work from his office). To make matters worse he is also a fanatical and blinkered Communist, forever regaling Mary Ann with stories of how much better life is in Stalin's Russia than in the USA.(Honey never directly contradicts her husband abo