Title: Richly Entertaining
Product review: 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.
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