Sunday, September 13, 2009

The Truth About Lorin Jones: A Review


The Truth About Lorin Jones
Alison Lurie
Little, Brown and Company
1988
328 pages

A serendipitous find of a novel by a Pulitzer Prize winning author keeps one good company over long weekends. It’s what I realized when I decided to finally open The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie over a three-day weekend last month.

I remember being primarily intrigued by the book’s title, then by its pallid cover which depicted a girl, a plain-looking, plainly-dressed dark-haired girl, who exuded a strange and intriguing aura, and then its very catchy synopsis.

After reading a few lines into the first chapter, I was hooked. Alison Laurie has a wonderful gift in story-telling, a style that quietly sneaks up on you and captivates you and glues you to her book. She is funny, unpretentiously intelligent, and realistic.

The novel tells the story of two female protagonists, both painters. The one still living, Polly Alter, is writing a biography of the deceased Lorin Jones. Polly, who considers herself a failed artist, is a fan of Lorin who is known to the industry as a genius. When Polly began with writing her first attempt at authoring a biography, she starts with a thesis wherein Lorin is a genius victimized by a male-dominated art industry and her male lovers, and this victimization cut her life and success short. Being enamoured with her heroine at the early stage in the work, Polly pushed the partial parallels between her and Lorin’s life as she tried to identify with her subject.

As she conducted her research, Polly met people who are related to, worked with, or slept with Lorin Jones; each had their version of who Lorin was. In the end, she realizes that Lorin was not a hapless victim of her trade. She might have been pressured, pushed around and tricked by some people around her, but she did her own pushing, pressuring and asserting too when she needed to.

All of these helped unravel Lorin’s story, while significant things occurred in Polly’s life. She had an unsuccessful foray into lesbianism, her continuous and mostly difficult negotiation with her estranged husband regarding their son, her complicated interaction with her best friend (and accidental lover) and her best friend’s girlfriend and feminist friends, and her painful peacemaking with her father.

In the unfolding of this complex story, readers learn about the shortcomings of the ‘ideals’, whether it is a person we idolize (a genius but quirky artist like Lorin Jones) or the ideology we choose to live by (feminism being a good framework to view the world with but not the only framework). Hence, despite the ideals that we learn as we go along our way, the truth about ourselves is that we try to be good and also do good but we move along, possibly not always on the road to the ideal, depending on the resources (or constraints) we have on hand.

After much discussion on the customary feminist discourses on choice, loyalty to one’s sex (mainly attributed to the weaknesses of the male sex), the book ends with a seeming nod to teenage pop fiction; the heroine (Polly), whose beauty heightens as the story progresses, decides to follow her heart and make a drastic transition with the man she recently met and fell in love with.