It is refreshing to find a story that touches on the relationship between art and life and still manages to avoid the narcissism which so often drenches such productions, giving you the uneasy feeling that the writer is hiding behind some half-open door, peering in as you read to see if your face is registering the proper degree of respectful sympathy. Picture Palace succeeds partly because Maude's discussions of her craft seem convincingly to be about photography—there is no sense that picture snapping is some heavy-handed metaphor for fiction writing—and partly because Maude really believes in the impersonality of art—the camera is, after all, a device for recording the external world—but principally because Theroux for the most part has a very firm grasp of what he is about. What he has given us is a superbly crafted, elegantly controlled novel in which most of...