This Picture-Imperfect Novel

People like to talk about what they like, writers especially; stereotypically lonely people, inside they are devoted fan boys and fan girls who’ve found a number of ways to worship their idols in print.  The novels of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon are peopled with characters who share the tastes of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon.  Books like Joanna Scott’s Arrogance, a portrait of Egon Shiele told through various fictional perspectives, and Geoff Dyer’s improvisational ode to jazz, But Beautiful, are both successful by the virtuosity of their prose and originality of their approaches.  And then there are monuments like Bruce Duffy’s historically-rooted The World As I Found It, the biographical novel about Wittgenstein, whose life and world is so fully-imagined in the book that it isn’t important to readers where Duffy draws the line between fact and fiction.