Literary Steal of Approval

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Fakery is unbecoming to an artist. Indeed, counterfeiting another's creativity is anathema to any honest painter or writer. With his previous novel, Peter Carey took that idea and gave it a macabre twist. In My Life as a Fake, he reimagined Australia's infamous Ern Malley affair - the 1944 literary hoax played by antimodernists Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who posed as a dead working-class poetic "genius" - by bringing a fabricated identity to life to haunt its creator. The novel's sprawling narrative was as gin-soaked and overripe as its Kuala Lumpur setting, but Carey's theme was sobering: how can we test the merit of a literary work?

In his new novel, Theft: A Love Story (Knopf; 269 pages), Carey shifts his magpie gaze to an art world overflowing with unscrupulous dealers, avaricious collectors and modernist forgeries, but his question is essentially the same. Ponders has-been Australian artist Michael Boone: "How can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea of what it's worth?" As Boone hails from Bacchus Marsh, Carey's birthplace, and finds himself at art's '80s epicenter in Manhattan, where the novelist has lived for nearly two decades, the question of creative worth would seem to resonate strongly with the Booker Prize winner.

Theft should sweep Carey's writerly anxieties away. After the chaotic excesses of My Life as a Fake, his new narrative grabs you by the throat and proceeds with a comic urgency not seen since True History of the Kelly Gang. Artist Boone is not dissimilar from that novel's vociferous antihero. But instead of the colonial authorities, he's up against an ex-wife (his unnamed "alimony whore") and an art-world élite (including "the idiots at Sotheby's") intent on stripping him of all worldly assets and self-esteem.

What lifts Boone from his paddock in northern New South Wales is the angelic figure of Marlene in her Manolo Blahniks. The daughter-in-law of Leibovitz, a Picasso-like modern master, she has come to value a work that has miraculously found its way into the hands of Boone's neighbor. But nothing is what it seems: Manhattan-accented Marlene is in fact a trucker's daughter from Benalla, in Victoria's Ned Kelly country, and the painting's contested authenticity will drag the smitten Boone and his "gorgeous thief" all the way to New York via Tokyo. Supplying comic verve is the book's sometime narrator "Slow Bones" Hugh, Boone's 100-kg idiot-savant brother. Wandering city streets with his folding chair, "I was up and off like a greyhound after an electric hare," says Hugh.

With Carey's fictional engines at full throttle, it seems petty to point out that Manolo Blahniks were virtually unknown in 1980. Or the unlikelihood of someone like Boone receiving a museum retrospective at 30, then falling into obscurity a few years later. And the early-'80s New York art scene was a little livelier than the moribund one his characters inhabit. But Carey isn't so much interested in the art world as in creative enterprise itself. "Shame, doubt, self-loathing," admits Boone, "all this we eat for breakfast." Perhaps we can allow Carey his moments of doubt. After all, with safer certainties, art - and writing as crackling as this - would lose its authentic zing.