[In the following review, MacCurtain discusses the plot and characters in The Truth about Lorin Jones, calling the novel “entertaining.”]

The epigraph to The Truth about Lorin Jones serves notice that the reader had best be cautious about Alison Lurie's intentions. It is a riddling quotation from a speech of the distracted Ophelia: “They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord! We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.” We might remember, too, that the character who described Ophelia's condition said that her hearers “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts”.

Polly Alter, a recently divorced single mother who works at an art museum, has been given a grant to write the life of an American painter, Lorin Jones, who died practically unknown in 1969 and whose work, thanks to an exhibition mounted by Polly, is now becoming famous. Lorin, a shy, solitary person, is seen by Polly as a victim of the men in her life, exploited as a woman, then neglected as an artist. Polly, since her divorce a doctrinaire feminist who has as little as possible to do with men, must now interview these destroyers of Lorin: her dealer, her half-brother, her ex-husband and the unsuccessful poet with whom she ran away.

Readers of Alison Lurie's novels will find that they have met many of the characters before: Lorin Jones, Leonard Zimmern, Janet Belle Smith, Roo March and others have all appeared, in various roles, in one or more of her earlier books. The connections between all these people and the different roads they have taken establish a world as rich, opaque and inconclusive as life itself; a human eco-system that registers every disruptive moment and reminds us that, just beyond the novel's action, other lives and other interests are in vigorous progress. The novel abounds in what are nowadays called “hidden agendas”. Polly's feminist friend, Jeanne, with whom she has a brief and unsatisfactory affair, insinuates both herself and, later, her lesbian lover into Polly's apartment. They work on Polly to make her wonder if she is not selfish in wishing to keep her fourteen-year-old son, Stevie, at home. Stevie has been on an extended visit to his father in Denver, and his return threatens to overcrowd the apartment and intrude an unwelcome male presence.

As Polly sets about her interviews, she finds that the men and women she talks to all have their own personal or materialistic reasons for wanting her to present their version of Lorin Jones. The politics of writing an artist's biography are deftly outlined. If Polly co-operates, Lorin's ex-husband, a famous art critic, will open doors for her professionally, her employers at the museum will promote her and the dealer who shows Lorin's work will see to it that her book is well and prominently reviewed. Though Polly herself is an angry and unhappy woman, she is honest about her own feelings; this honesty is her salvation, for her identification with Lorin Jones is such that, unsure as she is of her own identity, she runs the risk of losing it altogether and of mistaking Lorin's in the process. Lurie exercises great skill and sureness in moving between fantasy and reality in the development of Polly's character; as the novel progresses, Polly's combination of instinct and intelligence enables her to shake out the truth in what people tell her of Lorin's life and at the same time to direct her own life in counterpoint to what she is learning, both about Lorin and about her informants.

Though full of irony, the book nowhere descends to bitchiness. The irony arises from situations honestly, even charitably, reported. Those involving Polly's feminist lodgers may set one's teeth on edge, yet that is due not to any malice in the language, but the facts of the situation. All Lurie's novels rely on this sense of truth and a very particular kind of personal integrity. In The Truth about Lorin Jones, apart from an examination of the art world and the cramped little orthodoxies of the feminist party line, she conducts a study of the artist's personality and the creative process. She understands very well that reality is not really opposed to fantasy, but is full of it; that people are constantly creating themselves and later discarding all or part of the self they create. The artist is no different, except that she has an awkward ambivalence in her make-up: she is a solitary who yet hopes to be pursued into her solitude. She needs privacy and recognition. A child's vulnerability speaks in both needs, so the artist constructs a painting (or a novel or a piece of music) through which she communicates with the world from a safe distance.

In one of Polly's early interviews, Leonard Zimmern had warned her that “if you go on the way you are going, you could find out things about [Lorin] you don't want to know”. Near the end of the book she is faced with the biographer's (and the novelist's) dilemma:

it was clear by now that none of the people Polly had interviewed were lying, not wholly anyhow: everyone had told her the truth as he or she knew or imagined it. All they agreed on was that Lorin was beautiful and gifted (the two things I'm not, Polly thought sourly). Otherwise, everyone seemed to have known a different Lorin Jones; and most of them also had different versions of the other people in Lorin's life. As Lennie Zimmern had warned Polly, she had found out too much. How the hell was she ever going to make sense of it all?

The knowledge that reticence is as important a part of the writer's equipment as expression has helped Alison Lurie to provide us with a novel both dense with ambiguities and straight-forwardly entertaining.