From the start, Paul Theroux's ["Picture Palace"] takes us by surprise. In the first place, it's less exotic than most of his books, which tend to be set in far-off countries and to be peopled by characters who are foreign at least in outlook, if not in fact. It lacks the snap and crackle of, say, "The Family Arsenal," his best-known novel, and draws its energy instead from internal events: the unfolding and shaking out of old memories, the slow evolution of character over years and years.
There's also the surprise of finding that "Picture Palace" is not what the first few pages lead us to expect. That is, it's not, thank heaven, one of those books about famous but bored, crotchety, eccentric old artists gracelessly enduring the young biographer/sycophants who are nibbling around the edges of their lives. It's true that Maude Coffin Pratt is a well-known photographer, and that young Frank Fusco is busy ferreting out all her old pictures for a grand retrospective; and it's true that she refers to Fusco as a "barnacle" and to the retrospective as "taxidermy." But what makes the difference is that the art, here—Maude's photography—is more than just a convenient peg to hang a plot on. In fact, "Picture Palace" is, among other things, a serious reflection on the relationship between art and the artist: what art adds to the artist's life and what it subtracts.
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