The New Yorker
Scrounging around in a cupboard stuffed with three decades' worth of papers and academic debris, Glyn Peters, a recently widowed landscape historian, discovers an envelope marked "Don't Open-Destroy" in his late wife's handwriting. Is there anyone on earth who would obey such an injunction? Certainly not Glyn, who opens the envelope to find a photograph of his beautiful, feckless wife hand in hand with her sister's husband. Determined to understand his wife's affair, he delves into her past with a historian's tenacity and a good deal more interest in her than he managed to muster while she was alive. This search branches out to encompass a small circle of friends, all of whom have a share in the narration. But Lively doesn't stop there, and her characters' questions about the dead woman provoke questions about themselves and the roles they played in her life.
The New York Times
Penelope Lively's engaging new novel, The Photograph, is a testament to the virtues of lightness. Though her subject is not light -- it is in fact death, and the hold the dead have upon the living -- her method is subtraction, lightness, the quick, telling stroke. In this, her 13th novel, Lively, winner of numerous awards (including the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger), tempers sprightly enthusiasm with perfect command of the form. — Valerie Martin
The Washington Post
The Photograph is one of Lively's most satisfying novels: cleverly conceived, artfully constructed and executed with high intelligence and sensitivity. It is also a surprisingly suspenseful story, with developments unfolding in two directions, as Glyn and the other characters find out new things about a past they thought they knew and as their radically altered perceptions and feelings continue to sway their relationships. Lively has exceeded herself in her portrayal of these characters. Not only has she created a cast of memorably distinctive and believably complex individuals, but she has also succeeded in the subtle and difficult task of showing us how their feelings and conceptions are being transformed, both by the revelations about the past and by their ongoing, sometimes painful, encounters with each other in the present. — Merle Rubin
Publishers Weekly
Lively likes historians. Her most famous novel on this side of the Atlantic, the Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger, told the story of a popular historian; her latest narrates the quest of a "landscape historian" in search of what Proust called "lost time": the living past of his dead wife. Glyn Peters, a famous British archeologist, discovers a compromising photograph of his wife, Katherine Targett, sealed in an envelope in a closet at home. Peters specializes in excavating the long defunct gardens, buried fields and covered-over roads of the British landscape. Reverting to professional habits, he treats Kath's infidelity as a sort of archeological dig. The photo depicts Kath and Nick Hammond, the husband of Kath's sister, Elaine, surreptitiously holding hands on some outing, with Elaine and Mary Packard, Kath's best friend, in the background. Glyn decides to interview this cloud of witnesses, beginning with Elaine. Elaine is a successful, and somewhat cold, landscaper; Nick, her polar opposite, is a man one degree away from being a Wodehouse dilettante. Lively, who is never shy of letting us know her opinion of her characters (like Trollope), makes her disapprobation of Nick plain. Elaine, after learning of the affair, kicks Nick out. He takes refuge with Polly, their daughter, in London, and goes rapidly downhill. Glyn, meanwhile, has searched out Nick's ex-business partner, Oliver Watson, who took the photograph, and Mary Packard. Lively is always a discerning, keenly intelligent writer. This, for instance, is how she describes, in three irrevocable words, Elaine's pregnancy: "She is pregnant: heavy, hampered, irritable." Unfortunately, Kath, a demon-haunted beauty with little depth, remains unconjurable. Her insubstantiality and the much-foreshadowed nature of her death, not revealed until late in the novel, drains this story of its full emotional impact. 5-city pre-pub tour. (June 2) Forecast: Lively has strong name recognition, but her sales on this side of the Atlantic continue to be modest. Her latest is unlikely to break the mold, but her steady, reliable output (this is her 13th novel) should help keep her on readers' radar screens. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The chance discovery of a long-buried photograph and an accompanying love note gives Glyn Peters evidence of a recent affair between his dead wife and her sister's husband. The discovery causes him to question everything he believes about the past. Although the photographic evidence is unclear-a couple is seen from behind holding hands-the note leaves no doubt that the two were romantically linked. As Glyn shares the discovery with his sister-in-law, the two injured spouses behave as if this were a fresh betrayal. Glyn is a landscape historian accustomed to digging under the surface, and the photograph leads him on a journey through the past to learn whether the affair was a one-time dalliance or part of a pattern of betrayals. As successive layers are peeled back, the revelations create a ripple effect in the lives of those close to the couple and shed light on the mystery of how Glyn's wife died. This captivating novel will please Lively's longtime fans and may win her new ones. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/03.]-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A beautiful woman continues beyond death to fascinate her survivors, in this 16th novel from the Booker-winning British author (Spiderweb, 1999, etc.) also well known for her children’s fantasy fiction. The neatly turned plot is initiated by 60ish landscape historian Glyn Peters’s discovery (in an envelope marked "don’t open--destroy") of a photograph showing his late wife Kath in a pose of obvious intimacy with her brother-in-law. Glyn, accustomed to "excavating" the truth about people from structures they leave behind, shares this unwelcome information, producing seismic tremors in several interlocking relationships. Kath’s older sister Elaine, a sophisticated "garden designer," abruptly dismisses the errant Nick, a vagrant freelance journalist and lifelong underachiever, from their home, and their marriage. Their single daughter Polly, a distracted Web designer, tries and fails to make her parents reconcile. Glyn, meanwhile, questions old friends who might also have been Kath’s lovers, including arts festival exec Peter Claverdon (who’s gay) and publisher Oliver Watson (who took the offending photograph, but is otherwise innocent). Eventually, reclusive potter Mary Packard, who appears to have known the willful, probably unstable Kath better than any of them, arrives as a dea ex machina to reveal the motives behind Kath’s partially secret life. Lively handles this oddly unremarkable story skillfully, building a teasing fragmentary portrait of Kath from others’ memories of her--while clearly developing her manifest theme: the unknowability and mystery of other people’s lives. Only in the characterization of Elaine, a confident and capable woman sentient enough to understand and accepther own limitations, do the wit, constructive skill, and verbal facility lavished on what’s really a very slight story bear significant fruit. Always a pleasure to watch a pro at work, but Lively has done better than this. Agent: Emma Sweeney/Harold Ober Associates
