Modern Art: None

This slender, graceful novel brings us as close to the artist's experience as we can probably hope for in literature. The book deserves a wide audience. A must for anyone interested in the feel and sensibility of post-war American art.

What an intelligent novel about an array of interesting, complex, troubled, and ambitious people. Yes, it's based on the lives on Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, but the writer is so inventive and astute, she brings much more than a borrowed story to this endeavor. This is a spare, sophisticated, deeply wise book about why women love the men they do, why we romanticize the past, why we create art, why we revere the people who do it brilliantly, why we need each other and, often, why we abandon one another. It's edgy and tender and spectacularly smart and well written.

Knowing the author was also an essayist and critic, I was prepared for a scholarly and rather literary work. Wrong! Though the central character, Belle Prokoff, is a subtle, fully-dimensional portrait of the long-suffering widow of an alcoholic genius (based on the Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner saga), the world she inhabits is fraught with pretentious, loopy and/or greedy art-world denizens that Toynton dispatches with flair and obvious relish. The author has an gift for economical, vivid writing that wastes no time and is full of invention. This is a book about the art world that--rarely enough--needn't make insiders wince, but you don't have to care about art to enjoy reading it. An appreciation for colorful dialogue, for well-drawn, ultimately moving characters--in short, for excellent writing--is enough.

Evelyn Toynton is a wonderful, insightful writer. Her characters come to life and her powers of observation are first-rate. The New York Times reviewer focused on her dislike of the roman a clef genre, but praised the author's style and intelligence, which shines through on every page. This book deserves to be read!