Point of View

B. A. Shapiro tells her novel The Art Forger in the first-person limited-omniscient narrative mode from the point of view of Claire. The novel recounts not only Claire’s forgery of Degas’s After the Bath, but her discovery that the painting stolen from the Gardner Museum is itself a forgery. Claire serves to tell her own story because she is an outcast from the art world, and has important and intimate information to relate (especially regarding Isaac Cullion) that no one else has.

Yet, because of the first-person narrative mode, the reader is given unparalleled and uncensored insight into Claire’s thoughts, feelings, and considerations, access which no other characters have for much of the novel. This is immensely important given Claire’s discovery that the Bath from which she is forging is itself a forgery. This is also important given that the language...