Customer Reviews

Getting the Picture: A Novel

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The elderly residents of Pilgrim House are all females except for crusty stuffy George Griffiths. His being the only male not on staff ends when nude female model photographer Martin Morris moves into the retirement home.

Martin has a hidden agenda. Decades ago he met and fell in love with Mrs. George Griffiths. His Mo however chose to stay with her spouse and their children although Martin believes he was the love of her life as she was his as proven by the letters of love he wrote his beloved but wisely never sent. He needs to know why she never left the priggish snob. Although Mo is dead, Martin still writes to her as if she was alive and ready to join him even as he begins to investigate the life of Mo with George, who never knew of his wife's affair with Martin.

This is a fascinating character study that looks deep into the relationships at a retirement home filled with feisty individuals who all seem full of life. However, the prime focus is the intriguing triangle as the connecting woman is dead while one of the men in her life is unaware that the other was in her life albeit forty tears ago. Using letters (not just those written but not mailed by Martin), Getting the Picture is an entertaining relationship drama.

Harriet Klausner

I have read all Sarah Salway's books. She is one of the smartest, wittiest writers of present times, and I recommend anything by her. Getting The Picture is just great. I couldn't get through a page without smiling or laughing aloud. Two of the characters in particular were excellent examples of the bourgeois, self regarding, Mrs. Bucket type, but done in a fresh way because this is an epistolary novel. The requirements of letters narrowed their desire to correct another to the page, which made their pointed remarks particularly funny. The grandmother from A Good Man Is Hard to Find would have been quite happy at Pilgrim House, where everyone is scheming for something. There is one photography session where an old man and woman meet with a camera between them that is riveting; Salway adds layers to it in the retelling, so that the poignancy of the event overtakes the humor. I can't stop thinking about the state of mind of the 79 year old woman who lowers her shirt for the camera. All these old people still want to be seen, and to reveal themselves. Salway is a wonder at detail--small moments from all her books are permanently embedded in my mind. She gets at people's strangeness without being quirky. Don't know how she does it, but it's marvelous.