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"  The art-history-meets-art-mystery novel The Swan Thieves (Little, Brown) kicks off with a crime of passion: A painter named Robert Oliver tries to attack a canvas at Washington, DC&amp;#039;s National Gallery. Why he dunnit? As in Elizabeth Kostova&amp;#039;s previous best-seller, The Historian, the gathering of clues involves revisiting the past. Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow becomes so obsessed with his taciturn patient that he tracks down Oliver&amp;#039;s intimates, through whom we become thoroughly acquainted with the enigmatic artist. After several hundred pages, we focus less on the museum mystery than on these characters&amp;#039; painfully realistic domestic lives. Both of Oliver&amp;#039;s former partners were artists, as was the nineteenth-century French housewife whose letters he collected and on whom he has an impossible crush. Yet all three had to choose between making art and having a family. As Oliver&amp;#039;s ex-wife angrily recalls, &amp;quot;I never slept more than a few hours.... I did all the dull work of keeping the household going, I had no chance to paint unless I skipped even more sleep, and I couldn&amp;#039;t do that, so I didn&amp;#039;t paint.&amp;quot; Kostova doesn&amp;#039;t solve the puzzle of how to reconcile creative fulfillment and independence with wifehood, motherhood, and domestic responsibility, but it&amp;#039;s fascinating\u2014 and heartbreaking\u2014to watch her characters try. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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