SOURCE: Davison, Peter. Review of Familiar Spirits, by Alison Lurie. Atlantic Monthly 287, no. 3 (March 2001): 91-2.

In the following review, Davison judges Familiar Spirits to be a powerful, moving, and “revealing tribute” to James Merrill and David Jackson.

Sometimes an impressionistic memoir after the death of a literary figure can be definitive. The precision of a friend's intimate memory furnishes a connection to the senses, a stimulus to intuitive understanding, that a sedulous biographical assembly of documentary facts cannot match. In Familiar Spirits, Alison Lurie has written a revealing, happily far from objective tribute to and critique of the relationship between James Merrill and his life-and-literary partner, David Jackson. It conveys the bitter flavor of lives tried and failed. It rivals the pungency and impact of Lurie's lovely early work, V. R. Lang: A Memoir, which was published forty years ago under a subsidy by, yes, James Merrill and...