[In the following review, Bannon contends that The Truth about Lorin Jones is humorous, sly, and satirical but asserts that it does not match her best work.]

One thing is certain about Alison Lurie's novels. They always entertain. Although The Truth about Lorin Jones is not up to the high standards set by Lurie herself in The War between the Tates and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs, it is quirky, zesty, and funny enough to give enjoyment and amusement to its readers, most of whom will undoubtedly be women.

It is also both sly and sardonic in its satirization of lesbianism. A very polite form is shown here—no graphic physical details are given, only a kind of cozy cuddling, but the intense intolerance some lesbians feel for heterosexuals is made very clear. While this may antagonize some readers, it will ring true to others.

When first we meet Polly Alter she is thirty-nine, divorced, raising a teen-aged son she adores, but who is now off staying with his father. She “used to like men, but she didn't trust them any more or have very much to do with them.” Just what has turned her off them, apart from her contempt for her quickly remarried ex-husband, she doesn't quite know, but is trying to figure out herself.

What most fascinates Polly at the moment, however, is the museum grant she has received to write a book on a now dead American woman painter, Lorin Jones, whose work she admires greatly and with whom she is going to feel a closer and closer sense of personal identification as her research goes on.

Lurie gives us a kind of psychological mystery story as she forces Polly to begin to come to terms with not only the confusions and contradictions in her own life but those she is increasingly encountering in that of Lorin Jones.

Along the way Lurie is constantly reintroducing us to characters we have met in some of her earlier novels, including the ambiguous Lorin Jones herself, but don't worry if you haven't encountered them before.

This, after all, is “the truth about Lorin Jones” and by the time you finish it everything you thought you knew about Lorin, her family, and friends will have changed drastically, maybe even turned upside down.

Alison Lurie is at her best in her exploration of not only the relations between women and women, but women and men. Since Polly no longer likes men (she thinks) she decides to give sex with other women a try.

It doesn't really work for her, but one of the funniest scenes comes when, discovering her bed invaded by a very large, lecherous, and drunken man, she simply announces “I'm a lesbian.” It's a device other women faced with the same predicament might keep in mind. The man exits immediately and is very kind to Polly the next morning.

There is one male figure in Lorin Jones's life about whom Polly keeps hearing from the people she interviews in and out of the art world—Hugh Cameron. And as Polly is likely to do with anyone unknown to her except by rumor, she starts building up a picture of the man as an evil demon responsible for all the problems in Lorin's life. Well—maybe.

It is here, as Polly finally begins to see the truth about not only Lorin Jones but herself, that The Truth about Lorin Jones takes on a touch of an elegant soap opera. A most engaging middle-aged Key West, Florida man, with no apparent artistic aspirations in life and who has loved both women, brings Polly to her senses and persuades her that she is not a lesbian.

Still, one is left with a curious question in mind. Considering Lurie's reputation, this novel has received little review attention, pro or con. Could her devastating satirization of a certain kind of strident lesbianism have anything to do with that? It is an intriguing possibility.