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Please go to Paul Theroux.com's new site, Paul TherouxFree Computer Help Forum A
novel about a celebrated woman photographer. To the world, Maude
Coffin Pratt is her work -- and vice versa. Since the l920s, her
pioneering techniques and uncanny gift for stripping the masks from
the eminent subjects who come before her lens have firmly established
her legend. Now seventy, Maude plays her tough-minded, eccentric
character to the hilt for the benefit of a fawning public, in
particular the ambitious young archivist, Frank Fusco, who installs
himself in her Cape Code home to prepare a Pratt retrospective.
A uniquely
fulfilled life, it would seem. But as Frank rummages through fifty
years’ accumulation of photographs, the resurrected images take Maude
through her past and bring into painfully sharp focus the artist’s
conviction that her work and fame represent personal failure, her
outward life a long self-deception. Her true self lives only in the
“picture palace” of her mind and memory, and at its heart is a
piercing and obsessive secret: the incestuous passion which first
drove her to excel and which led, inevitably, to tragedy.
Maude’s hidden
story unfolds in many places -- from Provincetown to Florida, New York
to London -- and on many levels of perception. The subsidiary cast
includes the notables of twentieth-century photography as well as
other real-life luminaries, among them D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost,
Graham Greene, Patton, Hemingway and Picasso. |
