It is refreshing to find a story that touches on the relationship between art and life and still manages to avoid the narcissism which so often drenches such productions, giving you the uneasy feeling that the writer is hiding behind some half-open door, peering in as you read to see if your face is registering the proper degree of respectful sympathy. Picture Palace succeeds partly because Maude's discussions of her craft seem convincingly to be about photography—there is no sense that picture snapping is some heavy-handed metaphor for fiction writing—and partly because Maude really believes in the impersonality of art—the camera is, after all, a device for recording the external world—but principally because Theroux for the most part has a very firm grasp of what he is about. What he has given us is a superbly crafted, elegantly controlled novel in which most of the booby traps this sort of story sets for a writer are evaded with an easy finesse that almost makes one forget that they were ever there.

I should hate to suggest, however, that Picture Palace is nothing more than a fictionalized discussion of what the jargon calls the "creative process"; it is also, even primarily, about a wounded life. (p. G1)

The book is not, however, without flaws. The long sequence at the beginning, in which Maude has dinner with Graham Greene, strikes one as rather pallid, and here and there in the opening pages the comedy is a little overplayed—rather surprising in a novel in which elsewhere the tone of the protagonist's narration, a certain flinty puckishness that signals Maude's refusal to become the captive of circumstance, is one of its chief strengths….

But what is vastly more important is the novel's overall success. Theroux has a wonderful sense of style and pace, and his story builds in complexity without ever becoming cumbersome. The achievement is very real. (p. G4)