[In the following excerpt, Flower notes the difficulties inherent in capturing a life in biography and discusses Lurie's treatment of this theme in The Truth about Lorin Jones.]

Alison Lurie listens to another kind of barbaric yawp altogether, the language of predatory academics, enlightened feminists, complacent male chauvinists, suave psychotherapists, smug art critics, and affluent New York dealers. Her latest novel [The Truth about Lorin Jones] might be understood as a study of these competing jargons. Polly Alter, recently divorced at thirty-nine, sets out to write the biography of a little-known painter of genius, Lorin Jones, whose obscurity and death resulted (Polly will argue) from brutal abuse by the patriarchal system. Armed with her prejudices and a tape recorder, Polly is deflected and altered by everyone she interviews. Each witness creates a different version of Lorin or Lolly or Lauren or Laurie Jones because each witness is already a distinct individual, with a particular slant on the truth.

Lurie's conception bears some resemblance to Nabokov's in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: the zealous biographer always writes his own autobiography, and must even become his subject's double for a time. Polly learns that lesson deeply, ruefully. Her academic book remains unwritten at the end, but she has re-written her own life profoundly. Seeking the “real” Lorin Jones, she discovers her own repellent selfishness, escapism, and death instinct—as well as, more positively, her own independence. Lurie's treatment is more detached than Nabokov's, however. You never know whether she's being scathingly ironic or just disinterested. Lurie interrupts Polly's personal narrative with eight short chapters of her recorded interviews. In these we hear only voices answering questions: one belongs to a writer who was Lorin's friend at Smith, another is Lorin's former sister-in-law, another is Lorin's husband's closest friend. These “documents in the case” are balanced by Polly's subjective narration, a story of many false starts and erasures. She learns to reject the easy categories of other people's jargon. To her great credit, so does Alison Lurie. Few of her characters can be defined by their jargon or dismissed by a categorical label, notably her sharply individualized lesbian lovers, her several different academic artists, and her surprising ex-hippie poet. Some feminists will undoubtedly cringe at the way her story concludes, and some readers will wish Polly had changed more dramatically at the end. But that is as it must be. Lurie's novel is about the irreducible oddity and complexity of persons, something language can only approximate.