Paul Theroux is simply a wonder, and [Picture Palace is] a remarkable piece of work. In reviewing … The Family Arsenal … I spoke of how it (and its very fine predecessor, The Black House) each featured a desperate man endowed with great sensitivity, irony, and visionary or novelistic powers of forecast and apprehension. I also noted that both novels were consistently entertaining…. Picture Palace is even bolder and more daring than the last two, partly because its narrator … is a tough seventy-year-old photographer named Maude Coffin Pratt who is both desperately wrong about things … and righter about them than anybody else can be, the way artists are "right" about things…. The book undertakes a very complicated and satisfyingly dialectical exploration of blindness, sight, insight, vision and revision—which exploration is the equivalent to the moral and political argument of The Family Arsenal, or the anthropological and mystical one of...