Novel: Only Children

Overview
Alison Lurie follows two eight-year-old girls who meet during a weekend visit to one girl's country home and quickly form a close, uncomplicated bond. Their play and frank conversations become a window on the adults around them: parents, lovers, and family friends whose complicated emotional lives are observed with unflinching curiosity. The children's innocence and literalness strip away the polite veneers of middle-class behavior, exposing the contradictions and disappointments lurking beneath.

Plot
A brief social interlude , a short stay in a rural house , provides the frame for the narrative. The girls spend their days exploring the grounds, inventing games and trading confidences, while adult tensions simmer nearby. Romantic entanglements, marital dissatisfaction and petty cruelties that adults hide from one another are overheard, misinterpreted or silently registered by the children. As the weekend progresses, small domestic crises and awkward revelations among the grown-ups alter the atmosphere, yet the friendship between the girls remains a steady, clarifying presence that both illuminates and contrasts with adult confusion.

Main Characters
The two children are portrayed with tenderness and precision: lively, outspoken, and remarkably attuned to the emotional currents around them despite their limited understanding of adult motives. The adult figures form a cross-section of middle-class sensibilities , a variety of marriages, lovers and acquaintances whose desires and defenses collide. None of the adults are cast simply as villains; rather, each is shown as morally fallible, often comic, and sometimes poignantly human. The juxtaposition of the children's directness and the adults' evasions highlights the novel's sympathetic but satirical eye.

Themes
The central theme is the contrast between childhood candor and adult pretense. Friendship and loyalty among the children serve as a moral baseline, against which the compromises and self-deceptions of adulthood are judged. Questions of intimacy, fidelity, and social performance recur, as does an interest in how language and silence shape relationships. The novel examines how small acts , a withheld truth, a thoughtless remark, a casual flirtation , ripple outward to alter attachments and sense of identity, and how youthful perception can sometimes reach a truer moral clarity than cynical adult explanations.

Style and Reception
Lurie's prose is wry, observant and quietly humane, blending irony with genuine affection for her characters. The narrative voice keeps a measured distance, allowing comic detail and emotional regret to coexist without didactic judgment. Critics have praised the book for its deft social observation and for treating childhood with both realism and respect. The novel's compact structure and focused ensemble make it less an epic drama than a precise, gently satirical probe into how ordinary lives are managed and mismanaged, and into the ways small domestic moments can reveal larger truths.