SOURCE: MacCurtain, Austin. “What We Are and May Be.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4449 (8-14 July 1988): 259.

In the following review, MacCurtain discusses the plot and characters in The Truth about Lorin Jones, calling the novel “entertaining.”

The epigraph to The Truth about Lorin Jones serves notice that the reader had best be cautious about Alison Lurie's intentions. It is a riddling quotation from a speech of the distracted Ophelia: “They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord! We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.” We might remember, too, that the character who described Ophelia's condition said that her hearers “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts”.

Polly Alter, a recently divorced single mother who works at an art museum, has been given a grant to write the life of an American painter, Lorin Jones, who died practically unknown in 1969 and...