[In the following excerpt, Thwaite praises Lurie's astute commentary in The Truth about Lorin Jones on the craft of writing a biography.]

Alison Lurie's new novel is, among other things, an anthology of several characters from her earlier novels. Readers unfamiliar with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth about Lorin Jones is perfectly self-contained. Indeed, that self-contained quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is pursuing.

For Polly is engaged in writing a biography of Lorin Jones, a painter who died some twenty years before the quest begins. Polly has recently become divorced, has a teenage son whom she adores, and earns her living in a New York museum. At the time the book opens, she has secured a commission to write her life of Lorin Jones and has been given leave of absence to do so. From the beginning, there are parallels, it appears, between Lorin and Polly, making Polly all the more eager to write a book which will be sympathetic, properly feminist, and true. Lorin (1926-1969) died before the advent of true feminism, but it seems that she suffered at the hands of men. It becomes Polly's job to seek out those men (and some women), interview them, discover just how Lorin suffered, and why.

Gallery dealers, fellow painters, school friends, college friends, relatives and former in-laws-all are interviewed. Alison Lurie provides transcripts of their answers, not Polly's questions, these transcripts forming an almost impersonal running commentary on Polly's investigations. Alongside them go Polly's own journeys and returns, discoveries and blank walls, exaltations and miseries. Much of the time her confidante is Jeanne, at first a comforting ear and reassuring antidote to male mendacity, but whose lesbianism begins to be a complication: not so much because of designs on Polly, which Polly finds not entirely unwelcome, but because of Jeanne's tangled affair with the married Betsy. ‘If even two women couldn't be happy together, what good was it all? Maybe if you had to be in love, with all the problems and craziness that involved, it was better to be in love with someone who was dead.’

Indeed, ‘sometimes Lorin Jones's life seemed more real to her than her own.’ But there is also that common experience among biographers, whereby, faced with mounds of ‘evidence’ in the form of papers, reminiscences and, in the case of a painter such as Lorin Jones, works of art, they sometimes have moments of despair at an apparent carapace of material surrounding an enigma. Just as things begin to seem to come into focus, Polly finds herself drifting away from her subject, or rather, Lorin drifts away from Polly into a ‘lumpish amorphous mass’.

Then there are the contradictions, the anomalies, the injunctions made by those whom Polly interviews, such as a gallery dealer who says: ‘But you mustn't put any of this in your book, promise. It'd be fatal. I don't know why I told you anyhow.’ Gradually, as Polly presses on through the fog, she realises that ‘everything that had gone wrong for her over the last few months’ (relations with her son Stevie, with her friend Jeanne and Jeanne's importunate lover Betsy) ‘was because of Lorin Jones.’ Lorin's stepmother says: ‘I'm sorry … but Laura Zimmern wasn't a nice person.’ (Lorin has, or had, several names by which she was known; and Polly's own surname is—perhaps a bit too nudgingly—Alter.) The derogatory descriptions start to accumulate in Polly's head: self-centred and spiteful, self-centred and evasive and untrustworthy, selfish and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson's quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster.

When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew who were the most important men in Lorin Jones's life: her husband, Garrett Jones, the influential art critic, who can still make or break reputations; and, after the end of that marriage, Hugh Cameron, a poet of little reputation, with whom Lorin had some sort of affair down in Key West before her premature death. Polly is quite sure that Jones is ‘an old-fashioned male chauvinist’, and almost equally sure that Cameron is an exploiter, a slob. Indeed, Jones, after answering all her questions in a way she didn't expect and doesn't trust, makes a pass at her. Much later, in Key West, she discovers that the helpful and handsome man who has been trying to track down Cameron for her is in fact Cameron himself, now known as ‘Mac’. In the process of getting to know both of these men, Polly finds herself more sympathetic to Jones than she had ever thought possible, and she actually finds herself falling in love with Cameron: ‘though she knew all her informants were probably untrustworthy, whenever she got too close to one of them her vision blurred and he turned into a sympathetic person; in Mac's case, to worse than that.’

Alison Lurie is a very adept novelist, manipulating plot and characters with such consummate ease that it's only after finishing the book one notices how cunningly she has brought together her strands, establishing suspense here and exhaustion there, allowing one to make discoveries and be faced with puzzles as abruptly and with as much bewilderment as Polly. It seems likely that some ardent feminists will take The Truth about Lorin Jones to be an attack on their doctrines, both in view of the Jeanne/Betsy relationship (and how Polly is exploited by that) and, more broadly, in the conclusion of the book: ‘It wasn't Lorin Jones whose life had been ruined by men … Lorin hadn't been deserted and damaged by men, as Polly had; she had deserted and damaged them.’ But it's clear to me that this is evenhanded, neither doctrinaire nor insipid. If the novel is to serve as a text, it does so best as a terrible warning to biographers, forced to see the ‘multiple, discontinuous identities’ of their subjects atomically splitting under their eyes.