Act Like a Lady

By John Skaw

ONLY CHILDREN by Alison Lurie Random House;257pages; $9.95

When the actions of adults are seen through the eyes of children, irony is the usual result. The child misinterprets, but the reader understands. So seems the situation in Only Children, in which a couple of nine-year-old girls watch their parents misbehave over a long country weekend.

The time is 1935, and the place is a farm in the Catskills, presided over by a formidable middle-aged woman named Anna. She is headmistress of a progressive day school, and Mary Ann and Lolly, the girls, are her students. The other adults are Mary Ann's mother Honey, a fortyish Southern belle, and her father Bill, a stuffy but decent bureaucrat who runs a Government poverty program. They are soon joined by Lolly's parents, Celia, a pretty, distracted woman in her 20s, and Dan, an easy-riding adman in his late 40s. Dan and Honey turn out to be habitual flirts, and though neither is truly interested in the other, each seems too arrogant to retreat.

Mary Ann, a bright, prickly girl, is the author's most important observer, and it might be expected that events would arrange themselves so that she could see, if not wholly comprehend, what happens to the other characters. She does see a good deal, but unfortunately she misses more. 'No one, for instance, knows that Dan and the cheerfully manless Anna were lovers 15 years ago.

No life is changed drastically during the highly charged weekend. Circumstances and scratchy pride keep Dan and Honey out of each other's beds. Bill and Dan fight drunkenly but patch things up the next day. Celia is weak and worried as she leaves the farm, but that is the way she arrived. Honey never alters the coquettish mask that covers a considerable intelligence. Anna endures.

So we have not had the expected: the drama of adult caperings viewed by children. Is the author simply novelizing, inventing characters and taking them for a stroll? Not really; by sunset the symbolic Sunday night, when all the characters disperse, Lurie has made a strong and subtle point. The book's '30s setting is a clue: Why not 1879? Because the author's intention is to show the narrow range of adult female behavior that was on view to a girl of four decades ago. Men were defined in terms of their jobs and women in terms of their men--or lack of them. Celia was an adman's wife; insecurity was her way of life. Honey had nothing to do except tease. Anna, the strongest adult around, was considered eccentric because she believed that love was a trap. Little Mary Ann went home with sour choices ahead of her, and a headful of dissatisfactions that would not come clear until she herself was middleaged. The novel is a sketch of these hurts in their nascent state, and it is surprisingly forceful.

-- John Show

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