Foreign Affairs

When was the last time you read a novel whose heroine was "…fifty-four years old, small, plain, and unmarried – the sort of person that no one ever notices…"? Yet Vinnie Miner indubitably is a heroine, and an extremely satisfying one at that. A tenured professor who has published several books and has a well-established reputation in the field of children's literature, she is in London on sabbatical to do research for a book about the folk rhymes of school-children. As a confirmed Anglophile, she has been to England often before, and is delighted to be back again for six months' work, and to see the many English friends she has gathered over the years.

Fred Turner, the other principal of Foreign Affairs, doesn't share Vinnie's adoration either for London or for the British. Not only is it his first visit, not only is he flat broke because his funds from the U.S. haven't arrived, but he has just separated from his wife and is thoroughly miserable in this dismal city where it seems to rain all the time. Further, the British Museum Reading Room, where he is researching his thesis on John Gay, the eighteenth-century English poet, makes him claustrophobic, and he has almost no friends in this strange land.

The only connection between Vinnie and Fred is that they are both members of the English department at Corinth University, an Ivy League college. But they barely know each other, for Vinnie is a senior and established member of the department, whereas Fred is a very junior assistant professor without tenure who is trying to make his mark. Not surprisingly (as in real life) but unexpectedly (in the improbably and coincidental world of fiction), Vinnie and Fred don't become friends. Indeed, over the next few months, their paths cross only occasionally, and they never become close. Nevertheless, within a few pages the reader is enthralled by the improbably — and seemingly unsuitable — affairs on which both Vinnie and Fred embark. The author devotes alternating chapters to the ups and downs of each liaison, and it is a measure of her remarkable skills that though, on the face of it, each of these affairs could scarcely seem more unlikely, they almost instantly become utterly real for the reader.