BlindspotBy JANE KAMENSKY and JILL LEPORE

Reviewed by Peter Lewis

A tale of art, murder, love and cross-dressing in Colonial Boston.

 One of the pleasures of Blindspot is to watch as two meticulous historians take fiction's liberty. 

Blindspot is a love story and a murder mystery suspended between the picaresque journal entries of Stewart Jameson and the letters of Frances Easton, and couched in the exigent art of seeing, really seeing, things as they are. Or not. For our minds play tricks with how and what we see, and our perceptions are riddled with blind spots, some real, some metaphorical -- ignorance, say, or prejudice. Then there's love, a blind spot often big enough to drive a car through.

The setting is Boston in 1764. Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, historians respectively teaching at Brandeis and Harvard, have given their collaborative novel an 18th-century cast, with its decided earthiness and a joy in clever wordplay that seeks after the spirit of the idiom ("crapulous claw-baw") but avoids being smothered by it. Shades of Sterne, Fielding, and Richardson, though the authors are clearly too mischievous for only that; Jameson can as easily sound like the Captain in Tintin -- "Judas Iscariot on a flaming red chariot!" he barks -- as exhibit Ben Franklin's inclination for puns or Yogi Berra's for malapropisms.

Jameson has fetched up in Boston -- and what a Boston, chromatic in its role as backdrop, even in its state of shabbiness after a number of hard years -- on the run from a very big, bad debt back home in Edinburgh. He's a decent fellow, as well as a bit of a rascal. He has knocked around some in his 30 years and has a hand for portraiture and a knack, as David Hume put it, for reading the internal fabric of his sitters. He also has a head full of steam for quips, digressions, and womanhood, which is why he is unnerved, once he has set up his humble atelier in Boston, to be passionately, ineluctably drawn to his apprentice, young Francis Weston, "more beautiful than I would wish him to be."