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A Love Story
by Peter Carey
Book Reviewed by:From the book jacket: Michael—a.k.a. "Butcher"—Boone is an ex–"really
famous" painter: opinionated, furious, brilliant, and now reduced to living in
the remote country house of his biggest collector and acting as caretaker for
his younger brother, Hugh, a damaged man of imposing physicality and childlike
emotional volatility. Alone together they’ve forged a delicate and shifting
equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named
Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives on three-inch Manolo
Blahnik heels. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she’s also the daughter-in-law
of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz, one of Butcher’s earliest
influences. She’s sweet to Hugh and falls in love with Butcher, and they
reciprocate in kind. And she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the
making—or the ruin—of them all.
Comment: Theft is told through the alternating points of view of
the brothers—Butcher’s urbane, intelligent, caustic observations contrasting
with Hugh’s bizarre, frequently poetic voice. Tall tales, straight-out
lies and hoaxes are themes that run through Carey's novels, along with a
tendency to mix fact and fantasy. In this case the
central action is a high-stakes art heist wrapped around the tale of two
brothers - the probably brilliant painter Michael Boone, who has recently
been released from prison, and his psychologically damaged "idiot savant"
bear-like brother.
Despite having lived in New York for 15 years, Carey once again sets his latest book,
at least in part, in Australia, but we're also taken on a wild ride through
Japan and New York in a novel that has received exceptional reviews from all
prepublication review sources (including three starred reviews), and
has been variously described as "a masterpiece", "a certifiable hoot",
"edgy, irreverent, often hilariously profane", "sharply observed, well written,
and acerbically witty".
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2006, and has been updated for the
May 2007 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
If you liked Theft, try these:
by Siri Hustvedt
Published 2014
A brilliant, provocative novel about an artist who, after years of being ignored by the art world, conducts an experiment: she conceals her female identity behind three male fronts.
by Elizabeth Lowry
Published 2010
Thomas Lynch was once a brilliant young art historian. Now he is a disgraced, middle-aged art historian, overly fond of the bottle and of his fresh young students. But everything will change now that he’s on the trail of a lost masterpiece.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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