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. |
