But The Shadow Catcher soon shifts away from its portrait of the author. After the slightly satirical present-day scenes, we’re given a long passage from the historical novel referenced at the aforementioned luncheon. This novel-within-a-novel is based on the life of photographer Edward Curtis, who became famous for his images of early- to mid-20th-century American Indians in the Northwest. As Wiggins points out, he also had a tendency to doctor his artwork, airbrushing clocks and other modern details from his pictures. The historical novel about Curtis alternates with—and thematically echoes—the 21st-century chapters starring Wiggins-the-character, and builds into an engaging metafictional meditation on art and truth.

According to Wiggins, Curtis’s flaws fascinated her as much as his achievements. “The more I investigated his life, the more disillusioned I became with him as a person,” Wiggins says of the photographer. For one thing, he would leave his wife, Clara, for months at a time. “He didn’t even see his last child until she was 18 years old.” (Wiggins returns to the theme of absent fathers in the present-day chapters, which follow Marianne’s efforts to investigate a man who has been impersonating her long-deceased dad.)

The author admits that the imaginative possibilities of historical fiction interested her more than the historical record, and she took liberties to fill in the gaps of Clara’s early life in the Montana Territory and later Seattle, where she met Curtis. Wiggins says that the lacunae in Clara’s story reinforced her notion that women disappear from history, but they also made the photographer’s wife an ideal narrator: “I thought it would complicate the book and make it more texturally rich to tell it from Clara’s point of view, to see Curtis only through her eyes.”

As a whole, The Shadow Catcher aims to point out how tricky representation can be, especially when it’s being manipulated by an artist. Wiggins strongly believes that Curtis was irresponsible in the way that he staged his widely popular photos of American Indians, making his subjects look like noble symbols even as they were being forced off of their land. With a nod to W.G. Sebald, Wiggins scatters photos—many by Curtis, and a few taken by the author herself—throughout the novel, exploring how their meanings change as they mesh with the story. “I want to remind the reader that the photographs that Curtis took were always filtered through his lens,” she says. “It was his take on American Indians—not the truth.”

As it shifts back and forth between eras and story lines, The Shadow Catcher becomes a high-minded novel about family, history and the moral dilemmas of an artist. It might seem odd that a novel criticizing someone for playing with the truth would also fictionalize the lives of real people, but Wiggins contends that The Shadow Catcher is very different from Curtis’s works of supposed documentary realism. “I’m not pretending this is fact,” the author says. “My book says right on the cover: A Novel. ”

The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster, $25) is out now.