Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Excellent
Advantages:
An intriguing, mysterious, humourous read
Disadvantages:
Canny think of any
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
(Apologies to all sci-fi/ horror fans – this writer has been put in this category by mistake! She’s no more horrifying than an episode of Heartbeat – sorry!)
Alison Lurie is an American novelist who’s been around forever – at least it seems that way. Her most loved earlier works about extra-marital affairs and academic politics on college campuses in the Sixties have gone down as classics (The War Between the Tates, Love and Friendship, and others), and her last novel was published only a few years ago. Her books are acclaimed for their detail, their insight, their humour and their rollicking plots.
The Truth About Lorin Jones may be her best ever work – but then they all say that, don’t they?
Our heroine is Polly Alter – a woman who is picking up the pieces both of her failed marriage and of her doomed career as a painter. Her salvation comes in the form of a commission to write the biography of the brilliant but totally obscure artist, Lorin Jones. Polly’s passion for Jones’s work is matched only by her ruthless determination to reveal the real Lorin Jones – a woman Polly believes had her career ruined by sexist male art dealers and critics.
The task that lies ahead for Polly is difficult – impossible even, as Lorin Jones was virtually a recluse before her death, and never went on public record with revelations about her work or her private life at any point in her career. But Polly has deep, personal reasons for finding out everything she can about this enigmatic woman, and putting right all the wrongs that went unmentioned when she was alive.
As the book opens, we find Polly struggling to get by, living in her Manhattan apartment and bringing up Stevie, her teenaged son. She hasn’t got enough money, her husband has left her for a job in Denver, and she is beginning to wonder if it’s all a big cosmic joke against her as a woman. Her new-found feminist beliefs sit uncomfortably beside her love for her son – after all, he’s practically a man himself. And it’s men she blames for everything – her marriage breakdown, her stalled career as an artist in her own right, and most pressingly, the fact that Lorin Jones’s paintings are now being bought and sold for thousands of dollars when the woman herself died in relative obscurity.
Polly can’t wait to rip open that can of worms that is the misogynist, corrupt world of art dealers and gallery owners. She knows she’ll never sell a painting of her own again if she writes her expose, but this is a sacrifice she’s willing to make in the name of her beliefs.
So far, so principled. But she soon learns it’s just not that easy.
And as Polly’s research begins – her task is to interview every single person who ever worked with, or had personal contact with the mysterious Jones – we are taken on a journey of discovery into the worlds of two women: Lorin Jones, and far more interestingly, Polly herself. As she sets out to meet those who she feels have done her heroine great wrong, she has anger in her heart and a need to avenge. As the book develops though, and we meet those nasty characters for ourselves, we soon realise that there are two sides to every story and that Lorin Jones wasn’t the poor victim that Polly has cracked her up to be.
I love the way that Alison Lurie plays with the reader’s mind. One of the cleverer tricks in her box is to present us with only one side of each interview – leaving Polly’s questions out entirely. We can quite easily work out from the answers what was asked. The effect of this is both funny and enlightening, especially as the friendly, relaxed answers gradually become terse and defensive. Polly’s whole demeanour in the early interviews is downright infuriating – she’s convinced that she’s being belittled by the men she’s speaking to, and that it is her job as a biographer to see through the lies she believes she’s being told. She approaches each ‘suspect’ with bitterness and an unwillingness to listen or to believe.
She’s spurred on in this by her live-in flatmate, the voluptuous and sensual flouncy blonde lesbian Jeanne. Jeanne thinks that men are the enemy, and that it’s a war out there. Polly feels that she ought to agree, but finds this hard. Matters are further complicated when in loneliness and confusion, Polly invites Jeanne into her bed. The sympathetic reader feels glad that Polly is receiving some comfort at last – but is Polly really gay herself, or is she just mixed up?
Polly is determined to stay strong, but when she comes to interview one of Jones’s ex husbands – a famously lecherous chauvinist – she is finally forced to re-assess her vision of the exploited artist. The facts become clear – Lorin Jones herself knew all about exploitation, because she herself excelled at it.
And the best interview is saved for last – Polly heads down to lush, steamy Key West to hunt down Lorin’s toy-boy last husband, a man everybody knows was nothing but a cruel gold digger. Polly can’t find him, but she does meet a man who makes her examine her own life and needs in a whole new perspective.
I loved this book and I ate it in one big bite. I’ve never had much interest in art or the people who create it, but the characters Lurie gives us here are larger than life and twice as flamboyant. From the camp gallery owner to the premier league art critic, from Lorin’s childhood friends to her past lovers, everybody has their own take on this woman. And sometimes it’s hard to believe they’re all talking about the same person. Loved my many, hated by even more, her work is universally admired. But we don’t meet the woman herself – she’s dead before we arrive in the story.
As Polly digs deeper, her own life starts to mirror Lorin’s in ways the reader could never have predicted. In fact, at some points Polly questions her own mental stability, convinced she can actually communicate with the dead artist as if she were in the room.
Lurie has a habit of dropping leading characters from her novels into the backgrounds of her other novels. So the gay guesthouse owner from ‘The Last Resort’ crops up here – as a gay guesthouse owner - in the final chapters. Lorin herself was only a child playing on the beach with her parents arguing in the background in ‘Only Children’ – and there a few others too. If you’ve read her other stuff it’s fun to spot them – a bit like watching ‘The Bill’ or ‘Holby City’.
This novel just oozes class, intelligence, sharp humour and social observation. Lurie gently mocks the feminist stance taken by some of her characters, whilst simultaneously gaining our sympathy for them. Nobody gets to be right or wrong, nobody gets to be good or bad. We have to judge for ourselves, and be ready to change our minds at a moment’s notice.
One thing I will say is that this novel did lack a timeframe for me. I wondered if it had been written in the Seventies, but I learn from the cover that it was first published in 1988. There’s little in the story to truly reflect our ‘modern age’, and I felt that some of her references were slightly outdated. This can come across as being quaint or timeless, but I personally found it to be occasionally disconcerting.
I have no hesitation in awarding five stars though. This book will draw you in and keep you dying to uncover the truth about Lorin Jones, and the truth about us women. ISBN 0-09-974360-4
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