[In the following review, Maitland compares Lurie's fiction to the work of Jane Austen but faults The Truth about Lorin Jones, asserting that the book has a weak ending.]

Alison Lurie is a truly clever writer: sharp eyed and eared for the details of life about her, astringent, witty, and with a stylish control which allows her to use wit rather than be used by it. One very seldom feels that she sacrifices either truth or plot for the cheap joke and this is rare. I would not like to meet her, though; I would feel, as I would with Jane Austen (though Austen is ultimately more tolerant, affectionate, towards her own creations than Lurie) that my every mannerism and movement might well end up as grist for her mill.

The comparison with Austen is not frivolous—both of them take the social comedy, the novel of manners and use it for highly ethical ends, for exposing the triviality and dishonesty in many of our accepted codes and customs; they take the known characters of their daily lives and make the reader see them aslant, differently, better. But The Truth about Lorin Jones is not her best book, though all these hallmarks are present in abundance.

Poor Polly Alter is a New York art historian, nearly 40 and divorced, who doesn't trust men, is trying to write a biography of Lorin Jones—a dead but risingly important painter. As a good feminist she starts wanting to write the story of a delicate genius exploited and destroyed by the men in her life. As she proceeds to meet the men (and the women) who had known Jones she is forced to recognise (surprise, surprise) that this is not the whole truth; more, she is forced to deal with her own subjective identification with Lorin and find that she does not much like it.

The trouble is that the message is a bit simplistic—Polly Alter is so naive about herself and her subject that it is nearly impossible to believe that she could ever have got the job she is supposed to have at her museum, let alone land a commission to write a biography. Perhaps New York intellectual feminists are a different breed from British ones. (Perhaps also I have a subjective identification with New York intellectual feminists and I do not want us presented in this light—this is possible.) But I do not recognise these women: the lesbian scenes are frankly appalling and unfair to the narrative. If my best friends were women like this I, too, would seize the first opportunity to run off with a beach bum who had lied to me and who was the ex-toyboy of the subject of my biographical endeavours.

Offered a crude choice of becoming “an angry, depressed lesbian feminist or a selfish successful career woman” (yes, it is posed as bluntly as that), Polly takes a surprisingly long time (five pages) to decide instead that she will consent to insecurity, sexual passion and complexity. “To your own self be true”—the moral message of this saga—is fairly trite when the alternatives are so deadly.

And yet, on the way to so weak an ending, there are infinite delights. Lurie gives us, for example, “verbatim” the research interviews that Polly conducts: the subtle determination of every character to talk not about Lorin Jones, but about themselves is beautifully done; so is the forgiveness that Polly and her estranged father find for each other—a moment of real sweetness that makes all the wittier the failures and incomprehensions of their relationship.

Class refinements, opposing viewpoints, the subtlety of self-interest masquerading as truth, and some wonderful dialogue: Lurie is on to us all and converts the knowing into fiction. What weakens the novel is that the point that all perception is subjective, incomplete and “ideologically informed” is hardly worth making any more, and that Lurie doesn't really like women as much as men. A pity.