Inside Scoop: Museum Novelist Has Connections

And as Zuravleff turns a corner in an exhibition on Asian games, here they are again: earthenware ponies from China's Tang dynasty, playing polo. "Twelve hundred years ago somebody made this, and it's still here," she says, marveling at the thought.

Zuravleff was supposed to be an engineer, like her father and brother. "My Russian peasant people do not choose writing as a profession," she says. But after majoring in mathematics and English at Houston's Rice University, she rebelled, enrolling in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins.

Moving to Washington in 1982, she strung together a series of jobs, finally landing at the publications office of the Sackler and Freer (which share a staff) in 1988. Meanwhile, she was working on a novel whose main characters were engineers. After she published the book, "The Frequency of Souls," in 1996, she left the museum to write and parent from her Northwest Washington home -- and to explore even more familiar territory.

This made her museum colleagues a tiny bit nervous. "When she started writing," says chief curator Massumeh Farhad, "I thought, 'Oh my God, I wonder who she's portrayed.' "

No one in "The Bowl Is Already Broken" is real. Farhad, who thinks Zuravleff showed "uncanny" skill in her evocation of the museum world, says she sometimes found herself thinking "that's so-and-so!" as she read. But she was reacting to details, not whole characters. The people in the novel are at most composites, not real individuals, Farhad says.

The closest thing to an exception would be Zuravleff's and Farhad's old boss, Milo Beach.

"Promise me you're not writing about a museum," Zuravleff recalls the then-director of the Freer and Sackler saying when she told him she was leaving. "Oh, Mary Kay, Mary Kay," he said when she confessed. Later, after she'd created a museum director whose scholarship, like Beach's, focuses on the art of India's Mughal dynasty, she got nervous herself:

"Tell me you're not from Washington state," she pleaded.

He's not. Nor has he been kidnapped by terrorists in the course of his fieldwork. Still, Zuravleff's respect and affection shine through her portrait of R. Joseph Lattimore. Of this Beach-like character, she writes: "A brain, a heart, courage, and a good eye -- these were rare qualities to find in a single museum director."

"Did you see the article he wrote when he left?" she asks now.

Beach resigned as Freer-Sackler director in October 2001 and, a few months later, let loose a blast at his former boss, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small. Writing in The Washington Post, he charged that "the present administration of the institution views the life of the mind with astonishing indifference." Comic novel though it is, Zuravleff's book makes it perfectly obvious that she shares Beach's concern about museum officials who think fundraising first and content second.

"What Milo was saying," she explains, is that "there is a value to things that aren't corporate-linked." For example: The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made exhibitions with Islamic themes a tough sell to potential corporate sponsors, though the need for Americans to understand the Islamic world has never been greater. (It's worth noting, too, that the pressure on Zuravleff's fictional museum isn't purely financial. Its bosses don't care for the idea that a museum of Asian art is the first thing visitors see from the Metro escalator on the Mall.)