Inside Scoop: Museum Novelist Has Connections

As Zuravleff points out, however, she left the museum four years before Small arrived. What's more, the Smithsonian certainly does face financial challenges. "Somebody said: 'You didn't write a diatribe,' " she recalls. "I said, 'No, I wrote a cautionary tale.' "

Besides: It's not just a book about a museum.

"I start my novels with a question," Zuravleff says, "and the question that starts this book is: What is valuable to you? And: What would you sacrifice to preserve that which is valuable?"

Plenty of relevance there for someone in charge of a museum. But the questions are equally central to the lives of everyone in Zuravleff's cast -- especially Promise Whittaker, dedicated scholar, amateur juggler and hard-working mom.

Former Freer curator Linda Merrill particularly likes the way Zuravleff conveys Whittaker's deep love for her research while showing how she must instantly abandon her professional universe when a call from the school nurse comes through. The lives of working mothers, Merrill says -- in a brief phone interview, with a 2-year-old loudly demanding attention in the background -- are rarely so well evoked in fiction.

With two children and a curator's job, Whittaker's life is full. "Simply put, she wanted what she had but no more," Zuravleff writes. No such luck. On the same plot-thickening day, she learns that she's pregnant with a third child and is asked to guide her museum through the biggest crisis it has ever faced.

Commendably, her husband rolls up his sleeves to help. Unsurprisingly, he's stunned by the amount of work on the Mother Planet.

Returning briefly to the question of the real and the fictional: No, Zuravleff's husband doesn't smoke dope, and no, no, no, he doesn't wear socks with sandals. But when he got to the part in his wife's manuscript where Whittaker observes that the family dishwasher "looked as if it had been loaded by a blind person with a backhoe," he did write, "Aren't you getting a little personal?" in the margin.

Back on the museum tour, Zuravleff is talking about how much she had to learn just to write her book.

"I don't think I knew this existed before I worked at the Sackler," she says, gesturing at a miniature painting that offers a "personal and informal glimpse of the harem of Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqara." There are blossoming trees, swaying dancers, a parapet with calligraphy streaming across it. "The level of decoration on every surface: It just doesn't stop!" she says. "I mean, you could just get cross-eyed looking at that."

She doesn't, though. She tears herself away. On she goes, through the underground passage between the Sackler and the Freer, up the grand rear staircase that she relocated for dramatic purposes in her book, past the Buddhas, the hanging scrolls, the giant wooden Japanese temple guards and back outside to the sunshine of the Mall.

The Castle looms nearby. The two museums are almost in its shadow.

Perhaps you should visit them, dear reader -- as Zuravleff urges in her nonfiction acknowledgments section -- "while you have the chance."