SOURCE: Flower, Dean. “Barbaric Yawps and Breathing Lessons.” Hudson Review 42, no. 1 (spring 1989): 133-40.

In the following excerpt, Flower notes the difficulties inherent in capturing a life in biography and discusses Lurie's treatment of this theme in The Truth about Lorin Jones.

Alison Lurie listens to another kind of barbaric yawp altogether, the language of predatory academics, enlightened feminists, complacent male chauvinists, suave psychotherapists, smug art critics, and affluent New York dealers. Her latest novel [The Truth about Lorin Jones] might be understood as a study of these competing jargons. Polly Alter, recently divorced at thirty-nine, sets out to write the biography of a little-known painter of genius, Lorin Jones, whose obscurity and death resulted (Polly will argue) from brutal abuse by the patriarchal system. Armed with her prejudices and a tape recorder, Polly is deflected and altered by everyone she interviews. Each witness creates a different version of...