Entirely Coincidental? 
 This thoroughly entertaining novel carries the usual disclaimer: "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental." A disingenuous disclaimer in this case, since the author admits that her source is a famous photograph, "Couple at the Monocle, Paris, 1932." Unfortunately, no doubt for copyright reasons, this is not reproduced in Prose's book, which instead has a garish cover that does the text no justice; this book is not neon but noir. Do look up the picture on the Internet. You will see two figures sitting side by side at a disheveled cafe table; one is a birdlike woman, the other a slightly pudgy man. Both are staring into private spaces of their own; the male figure seems distracted, a little sad, even tormented; what is going on in his mind? Francine Prose asked herself the same question, and the result is this novel, a stirring and at times even moving blend of imagination and fact. 
 As the full title of the photograph would reveal, the "man" is in fact a woman in male clothes. The stylishness of her suit, tie, and silk handkerchief contrasts with the rumpled collar and her slightly lost air; this is a woman who is comfortable nowhere, certainly not in conventional female roles, but not entirely in male ones either. Prose discovered that the original was a Frenchwoman named Violette Morris, trained to phenomenal strength as an athlete in many sports, including discus, soccer, and water polo, and later achieving fame as a race-car driver. But as a national role-model, her unacceptable bisexual lifestyle got her banned from participation in the 1928 Olympics, causing her to withdraw from sport. Later still, she was recruited as a spy for the Germans and ultimately worked for the Gestapo as an interrogator. 
 Francine Prose says she considered writing her story as non-fiction, but eventually decided on a novel. So Violette becomes Lou Villars, whose life story follows the original pretty closely. But the facts are not the point: in the first few pages, we are told the equivalent to virtually everything I have said about Violette Morris above. Prose's purpose is to ask the searching questions: how could a national heroine turn into torturer and traitor, and what did it feel like to live inside the hyperdeveloped body and tormented mind of Violette/Lou? To do this, she interweaves many voices: drafts of a biography written sixty years later, the autobiography of a French Baroness who was for a while Lou's patron, excerpts from the writings of an expatriate American writer, the letters of the Hungarian photographer who took the photo, and the memoirs of his wife, whose path crossed Lou's on several memorable occasions. Not all the voices are equally successful; the American writer seems almost peripheral to the plot and his writing has nothing of the spice of Henry Miller, his presumed model. But together they make a finely nuanced portrait not only of the major characters involved, but also of the decadent period between the wars that nursed the ensuing tragedy. 
 [Ignore, incidentally, the references to Rashomon you will see on the book cover. Although these various accounts differ in perspective and minor detail, this only gives greater depth to the whole, and a softer-edged sympathy. There is none of the outright contradiction you get in the Kurosawa film masterpiece, although a chapter near the very end of the book will introduce a surprising new twist.] 
 But Lou Villars, while interesting, was not the main attraction of the book for me. No, it was the artist behind the camera of the original photograph, the great Romanian photographer Brassai. Apart from changing his name to Gabor Tsenyi and his nationality to Hungarian, Prose adheres much more closely to his real biography than she does with any of her other characters, including his fondness for photographing the Paris of the shadows and his later friendship with Picasso. His was the viewpoint that I trusted most, because in essence it still exists. Rely on the author's prose to provide insight into the torments simmering behind the man-woman in the famous photo, but keep a gallery of the real Brassai photographs open as you read, as the perfect visual background to this intriguing novel.