[The Picture Palace] is an entertainment in the best sense…. Theroux knows what he's about, writing lively narrative, controlling the mystery story element of his plot, withholding a significant scene. Maude Coffin Pratt is a famous photographer, an appealing, arrogant, cantankerous old woman and a brilliant creation on Theroux's part. She has become a legend and, though she has spent her life in seeing the major events and most celebrated faces of the century and in sorting out art from fraud and fashion, in her pride Maude has lost sight of her self and come to believe in her own legend. (p. 432)

The main irony of The Picture Palace is that as Maude's legend comes unwound through an exploration of her past, a new force is given to the myth of the great woman photographer in a retrospective show of her work…. (p. 433)

Theroux's imagery of seeing and not seeing is precisely worked out, and the inner plot of incestuous love, deception, youthful tragedy is highly romantic—I feel somewhat too romantic—with its smoldering gothic details, but it serves as a foil to Maude's contemporary cynicism and private disillusion. One of the joys of reading The Picture Palace is listening to Maude Pratt's running commentary on the state of our culture. She gives us a biased, spicy history of modern photography, a no-nonsense account of the snobbish mystique of the Steiglitz studio, a list of the modish subjects for amateur photographers. An absolutely independent spirit, she is fearless in her assessments of the great. Here Theroux is a bit self-indulgent, getting off good ones at the Guggenheim Foundation, the pretensions of Cocteau, Hemingway, etc. It is Maude to have seen it all, known it all; but the center of the novel is trivialized by too many of her asides. It is not a major fault in a most readable book, which is as serious in its moral content but finer in construction, and more vital, than any of the later novels of Graham Greene, whom Theroux obviously admires. The strict containment of design in The Last Train Robbery, The Consul's File, and The Picture Palace imposes a limit, not to our enjoyment, but to the possibilities of a deeper appreciation of Theroux's work. There is "one missing," some intensity, excess, claim of language or still, unplotted moment that he does not admit, but The Picture Palace successfully concerns itself with the roots of ambition, professionalism in art, and the obscure double vision of self-perception—to be read with pleasure and some care. (pp. 433-34)