Theft Hardcover - 2006

Summary

Excerpt

I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been about as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard. It was the year I should have got the Order of Australia--why not!--look at who they give them to. Instead my child was stolen from me and I was eviscerated by divorce lawyers and gaoled for attempting to retrieve my own best work which had been declared Marital Assets.

Emerging from Long Bay Prison in the bleak spring of 1980, I learned I was to be rushed immediately to northern New South Wales where, although I would have almost no money to spend on myself, it was thought that I might, if I could only cut down on my drinking, afford to paint small works and care for Hugh, my damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother.

My lawyers, dealers, collectors had all come together to save me. They were so kind, so generous. I could hardly admit that I was fucking sick of caring for Hugh, that I didn't want to leave Sydney or cut down on drinking. Lacking the character to tell the truth I permitted myself to set off on the road they had chosen for me. Two hundred miles north of Sydney, at Taree, I began to cough blood into a motel basin. Thank Christ, I thought, they can't make me do it now.

But it was only pneumonia and I did not die after all.

It was my biggest collector, Jean-Paul Milan, who had designed the plan wherein I would be the unpaid caretaker of a country property he had been trying to sell for eighteen months. Jean-Paul was the proprietor of a chain of nursing homes which were later investigated by the Health Commission, but he also liked to paint and his architect had made him a studio whose riverside wall opened like a lube-bay door. The natural light, as he had so sweetly warned me, even as he made his gift, was perhaps a little green, a "fault" produced by the ancient casuarinas that lined the river. I might have told him that this issue of natural light was bullshit, but again I held my tongue. That first night out of gaol, at a miserably wine-free dinner with Jean-Paul and his wife, I agreed that we had tragically turned our backs on natural light, candlelight, starlight, and it was true that the Kabuki had been superior in candlelight and that the paintings of Manet were best seen by light of a dusty window, but fuck it--my work would live or die in galleries and I needed 240 reliable volts of alternating current to do my stuff. I was now destined to live in a "paradise" where I could be sure of no such thing.

Jean-Paul, having so generously given us his house, began immediately to fret that I might somehow hurt it. Or perhaps the true alarmist was his wife who had, long ago, caught me blowing my snotty nose into her dinner napkin. In any case, it was only six mornings after we first arrived in Bellingen that Jean-Paul burst into the house and woke me. This was a nasty shock at almost every level, but I held my tongue and made him coffee. Then for two hours I followed him around the property as if I were his dog and every stupid thing he told me I wrote down in my notebook, an old leather-bound volume that was as precious to me as life itself. Here I had recorded every colour mix I had made from the time of my so-called breakthrough show in 1971. It was a treasure house, a diary, a record of decline and fall, a history. Thistles, said Jean-Paul. I wrote "thistles" in my lovely book. Mowing. I spelled it out. Fallen trees across the river. Stihl chain saw. Grease nipples on the slasher. Then he was offended by the tractor parked beneath the house. The woodpile was untidy--I set Hugh to stack it neatly in the pattern Jean-Paul preferred. Finally my patron and I arrived at the studio together. He removed his shoes as if he meant to pray. I followed suit. He raised the big lube-bay door to the river and stood for a long moment looking down at the Never Never, talking--this is not made-up--about Monet's fucking Water Lilies. He had very pretty feet, I had noticed them before, very white and high-arched. He was in his mid-forties but his toes were straight as a baby's.

Although he owned some twenty nursing homes, Jean-Paul was not personally a great one for touching, but here in the studio, he laid his hand on my forearm.

"You'll be happy here, Butcher."

"Yes."

He gazed around the long high room, then began to brush those rich, perfect feet across the soft surface of the floor. If his eyes had not been so moist he would have looked like an athlete preparing for some sci-fi track event.

"Coachwood," he said, "isn't it something?"

He meant the floor, and it was truly lovely, a washed pumice grey. It was also a rare rain-forest timber, but who was I, a convicted criminal, to argue ethics?

"How I envy you," he said.

And so it went, by which I mean that I was as docile as a big old Labrador quietly farting by the fire. I could have begged him for canvas, and he would have given it to me, but he would have wanted a painting. It was that picture, the one I was not going to give him, that I was thinking of right now. He didn't know it, but I still had about twelve yards of cotton duck, that was two good pictures before I was forced to use Masonite. I quietly sipped the nonalcoholic beer he had brought me as a gift.

"Good isn't it?"

"Like the real thing."

Then, finally, the last instructions were issued, the promises all given. I stood beneath the studio and watched him bounce his rent-a-car across the cattle grid. He bottomed out as he hit the bitumen, and then he was gone.

Fifteen minutes later I was in the village of Bellingen, introducing myself to the blokes at the Dairyman's Co-op. I bought some plywood, a hammer, a carpenter's saw, two pounds of two-inch Sheetrock screws, twenty 150W incandescent floods, five gallons of Dulux jet black, the same of white, and all this, together with some odds and ends, I charged to Jean-Paul's account. Then I went home to set up the studio.

Later everyone would get in a bloody uproar because I had supposedly vandalised the coachwood with the Sheetrock screws, but I can't see how else I could have laid the ply on top of it. Certainly, it could not work the way it was. I was there to paint as everybody knew, and the floor of a painter's studio should be like a site of sacrifice, stabbed by staples, but also tended, swept, scrubbed, washed clean after every encounter. I laid cheap grey linoleum on top of the ply and coated it with linseed oil until it stank like a fresh pieta. But still I could not work. Not yet.

Jean-Paul's prizewinning architect had designed a studio with a high-arched roof and this he had tensioned with steel cables like the strings on a bow. It was a bloody wonder of a thing, and I suspended banks of incandescent floodlights from the cables which pretty much eliminated both the elegance of his design and the green light coming through the casuarinas. Even with these improvements it was hard to imagine a worse place to make art. It was as buggy as a jungle and the insects stuck to my Dulux paint, marking their death agonies with concentric circles. And of course that big wide door was an open invitation to the little fucks. I went back to the co-op and signed for three of those blue-light insect zappers but that was like a finger in the dyke. All around me was subtropical rain forest, countless trees and insects as yet unnamed, unless by me--you cunt, you little shit--who sabotaged the scrubbed and sanded flatness of my hard-won work. In defense I tacked up ugly flywire but the sections were not wide enough and in despair I had a silk curtain made on credit--Velcro running down its sides and a great heavy sausage of sand along its base. The curtain was a deep, deep blue, and the sausage a rust brown. Now the little saboteurs fell into its sweaty silky crotch and there they died in their thousands every night. I swept them out when I cleaned my floor each morning, but some I saved as life models, for no other reason than drawing is relaxing and I would often, particularly when I had run out of wine, sit at my dining table and slowly fill my notebook with careful grey renditions of their lovely corpses. Sometimes my neighbour Dozy Boylan would name them for me.

By early December my brother Hugh and I were ensconced as the caretakers and we were still there in high summer when my life began its next interesting chapter. Lightning had struck the transformer up on the Bellingen Road and so, once again, there was no good light to work by, and I was paying for my patron's kindness by prettifying the front paddock, hacking with a mattock at the thistles around the FOR SALE sign.

January is the hottest month in northern New South Wales, and also the wettest. After three days of soaking rain the paddocks were sodden and when I swung the mattock the mud was warm as shit between my toes. Until this day the creek had been gin-clear, a rocky stream rarely more than two feet deep, but the runoff from the saturated earth had now transformed the peaceful stream into a tumescent beast: yellow, turbulent, territorial, rapidly rising to twenty feet, engulfing the wide floodplain of the back paddock and sucking at the very top of the bank on whose edge the chaste studio was, sensibly but not invulnerably, perched on high wooden poles. From here, ten feet above the earth, one could walk out above the edge of the raging river as on a wharf. Jean-Paul, when explaining the house to me, had named this precarious platform "the Skink" referring to those little Australian lizards who drop their tails when disaster strikes. I wondered if he had noticed that the entire house was constructed on a floodplain.

We had not been in exile very long, six weeks or so, and I remember the day because it was our first flood, also the day when Hugh had arrived home from our neighbours with a Queensland heeler puppy inside his coat. It was difficult enough to look after Hugh without this added complication, not that he was always troublesome. Sometimes he was so bloody smart, so coherent, at other times a wailing gibbering fool. Sometimes he adored me, loudly, passionately, like a whiskery bad-breathed child. But the next day or next minute I would be the Leader of the Opposition and he would lay in wait amongst the wild lantana, pounce, wrestle me violently into the mud, or the river, or across the engorged wet-season zucchini. I did not need a sweet puppy. I had Hugh the Poet and Hugh the Murderer, Hugh the Idiot Savant, and he was heavier and stronger, and once he had me down I could only control him by bending his little finger as if I meant to snap it. We neither of us required a dog.

I severed the roots of perhaps a hundred thistles, split a little ironbark, fired up the stove which heated the water for the Japanese soaking tub and, having discovered that Hugh was asleep and the puppy missing, I retreated out on to the Skink, watching the colours of the river, listening to the boulders rolling over each other beneath the Never Never's bruised and swollen skin. Most particularly, I observed my neighbour's duck ride up and down the yellow flood whilst I felt the platform quiver like a yacht mast tensing under thirty knots of wind.

Somewhere the puppy was barking. It must have been overstimulated by the duck, perhaps imagined it was itself a duck--that seems quite likely now I think of it. The rain had never once relented and my shorts and T-shirt were soaked and I suddenly understood that if I removed them I would feel a good deal more comfortable. So there I was, uncharacteristically deaf to the puppy, squatting naked as a hippy above the surging flood, a butcher, a butcher's son, surprised to find myself 300 miles from Sydney and so unexpectedly happy in the rain, and if I looked like a broad and hairy wombat, well so be it. It was not that I was in a state of bliss, but I was, for a moment anyway, free from my habitual agitation, the melancholy memory of my son, the anger that I had to paint with fucking Dulux. I was very nearly, almost, for sixty seconds, at peace, but then two things happened at once and I have often thought that the first of them was a kind of omen that I might well have paid attention to. It only took a moment: it was the puppy, speeding past borne on the yellow tide.

Later, in New York, I would see a man jump in front of the Broadway Local. There he was. Then he wasn't. It was impossible to believe what I had seen. In the case of the dog, I don't know what I felt, nothing as simple as pity. Incredulity, of course. Relief--no dog to care for. Anger--that I would have to deal with Hugh's ill-proportioned grief.

With what plan in mind I do not know, I began struggling with my wet clothes, and thus, accidentally, had a clear view, beneath the studio, of my front gate where, some twenty yards beyond the cattle grid, I saw the second thing: a black car, its headlights blazing, sunk up to its axles in the mud.

There was no justifiable reason for me to be angry about potential buyers except that the timing was bad and, fuck it, I did not like them sticking their nose in my business or presuming to judge my painting or my housekeeping. But I, the previously famous artist, was now the caretaker so, having forced myself back into my cold and unpleasantly resistant clothes, I slopped slowly through the mud to the shed where I fired up the tractor.

Media reviews

“In addition to historical, behavioral, and playful storytelling dimensions, there is an emphatically physical dimension of conflict to [Carey’s] work, conveyed not through words but in between them. The air in his novels can feel charged and changeable, thinning to ghostliness or thickening to sluggishness, as before a storm. Carey’s latest novel operates on all these levels, and a couple of new ones . . . . [Hugh’s] voice is studded with funny malapropisms, Joyce-inflected scat, and a low-grade hysteria that Carey humorously conveys . . . The most skillful effect in Theft is Carey’s complex weaving of [the brothers’] harsh emotional legacy into the grown men’s thoughts, behavior, and spasmodic jokes . . . On the surface Carey’s [prose] pulls us forward in an atmosphere of antic noir. But the book turns out to be nearly as dense with themes, subplots, and embedded details as a more capacious and ambitious work like Oscar and Lucinda . . . Impressive.”
–Sarah Kerr, New York Review of Books

“[A] brilliant fictional world . . . Opening a Peter Carey novel is a little like being seduced . . . There is never a pause or moment of hesitation in his writing, immediately absorbing you within his fictional constructs by the power of his narrative voices . . . This is dizzyingly poetic prose . . . [Theft] is a refreshing change from the dreary domesticity and realism of contemporary fiction . . . If you haven’t already, you might want to introduce yourself to Peter Carey. Theft is a virtuoso inauguration, not to mention a great first date.”
–Sharon Dilworth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“I can’t not read a book by Peter Carey . . . Carey is best known for his (wonderful) historical novels, but he’s in his glorious element when writing about the contemporary world, too . . . He’s a consummate storyteller with a wicked eye and a tremendous ventriloquist’s gift.”
–Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly

“Peter Carey’s funny, rumbustious new novel takes on the contemporary art world with the same scathing wit that characterized Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction evisceration of the lost, nihilistic post-1950s art scene in The Painted Word . . . Written with terrific verbal energy and a snide, lashing sense of humour, Theft is a marvellous caper, a wicked little love story and a fine mockery of an industry that probably deserves it.”
–The Economist

“Superbly rendered . . . Hugh’s voice enthralls . . . Style when projected by Carey’s characters is an existential muzzle-flash, alerting us to the shooter behind the light and noise . . . Theft is a work of art that successfully reflects upon the conditions in which art is created, [with a] pulsating, inimitably authentic, core.”
–Siddartha Deb, Telegraph

“The strength of Theft lies in its narrative voice and in Carey’s delight in his subject. The two-time Booker winner is clearly enjoying himself.”
–Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor

“At once a love story, a tragedy, a comedy, a tragicomedy, and an artist’s journey . . . Carey manages to maintain a haunting balance . . . [He] certainly lives up to his reputation as a versatile post-colonial literary voice in his virtuosity and conscientiousness in conjuring worlds spanning Australia, Japan, and America . . . At the heart of Carey’s achievement is the profundity of isolation–the sacred, inviolable inscrutability of an individual’s subjectivity.”
–Amy Wong, Harvard Book Review

“Brilliant Peter Carey has written another marvelous novel . . . A hilarious romp, [a] mad caper of a story . . . Virtuoso . . . Theft is witty, urbane, funny and profound down to its last searing line.”
–Joan Mellen, Baltimore Sun

“[A] very funny new novel [with an] ingeniously worked-out art-fraud plot . . . Theft is the kind of novel only an abundantly gifted artist, and one serious about his craft, could produce. Carey proves once again that he’s about as good a novelist as we’ve got today.”
–Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

“Complex, tense and captivating . . . An inventive thriller, [a] continent-jumping caper . . . Its alternating narrators, Michael and Hugh, are easily two of Carey’s most vibrant and memorable characters . . . Hilarious, pitch-perfect . . . A complete, compelling and satisfying tale, Theft is made doubly rewarding by [its] fraternal narrators, who lend the novel a stunning degree of humanity and authenticity.”
–Thomas Haley, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Carey is a] brilliantly inventive writer . . . Hugh’s is the yawping, anguished voice of the id, a primal bundle of sensation, clarity and need. Carey’s genius speaks through Hugh . . . [Theft] is an authentic love story about two brothers who can’t stand themselves, and can’t live without each other.”
–Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times

“Peter Carey is an astonishing novelist . . . The plot of Theft is well-crafted and engaging, but the real strength of the novel is in its characterizations . . . It’s Carey’s genius that these two cranky misfits rule the day . . . A wild and satisfying ride.”
–Mary J. Elkins, Rocky Mountain News

“Uproarious . . . Theft is brilliantly constructed, and in Butcher and Hugh, Carey creates two narrators the reader cannot help but care about. No aspect of the art world and the rarified atmosphere of its collectors escapes Carey’s rapier wit, and the humor is non-stop . . . Carey has outdone himself with this novel, one of his best–a comic masterpiece.”
–Mary Whipple, MostlyFiction.com

“Remarkable . . . Carey likes these intricate, spangly plots, with their outrageous truancies from verisimilitude and their lizard-like velocity; he is one of the most fantastical storytellers in the language, and yet the stories are not unreal, and this is partly why readers can never decide who he is like: is it Dickens, or Joyce, or Kafka, or Faulkner, or Nabokov, or García Márquez, or Rushdie? Two of the realisms that ground these dense fantasies are Carey’s ability to animate even minor characters with a flick of novelistic attention, and his great interest in the warped reality of spoken language. One of the great familiar pleasures of his new novel is the way the language recklessly mixes different registers into a vivid democracy, now high and now low, but always interestingly rich . . . The great enricher of the novel is its second narrator, Hugh Boone[,] a Faulknerian monologist, who speaks a barbarous, spoiled poetry, sometimes weirdly funny and slangy and sometimes manically vatic and biblical, with frequent crescendos into capital letters . . . His riffs are moving, twisted, and sometimes sublime.”
–James Wood, London Review of Books

“Revelatory, inspired . . . A screwball noir tale . . . Carey is a loon from down under, a mad max who drives language and plot straight through the great barrier reef of the commonplace . . . Oftentimes writers known for their derring-do with language are better admired than read . . . Carey in contrast wants his readers to join him in a good laugh right now . . . Carey’s language is so lively, so unaffected that the big ideas here slip in under cover of a joke. In this divine comedy of a novel, Carey gives his readers a rollicking lark of a story as well as a sense of eternity in a grain of sand.”
–Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air/NPR

“Meticulously convincing . . . Certainly the most intricately plotted and the most sheerly entertaining novel about a painter I’ve ever read . . . You have to read the book to savour all the sheer wickedness and cut-throat cunning of the international modern art world and the final pages are exquisitely startling . . . I haven’t read such authoritative writing on art forgery and art fraud since William Gaddis’s masterpiece, The Recognitions. Nor have I read so affecting an account of the life of two brothers, one of whom is deemed by the rest of the world to be soft in the head, since Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala . . . Carey’s jaundiced eye on the contemporary art scene is wonderfully and destructively satirical and the humour robust and farcical but never crude. It would be entirely unsurprising if Carey becomes the first ever triple Booker, or Man-Booker, winner.”
–Tom Rosenthal, Independent on Sunday

“The brilliantly restless [Carey] has rebelled, grown in confidence, and rebelled again . . . Radical independence is profoundly present in this novel . . . As a love story, Theft is remarkably disabused . . . The ending is wonderfully executed.”
–Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement

“In a word, superb . . . Carey is a master of voice, and he puts his expertise to good use again in his latest book . . . He is absolutely breathtaking when writing in Hugh’s changeable, lyrical and often hilarious voice . . . It’s not just the story, which is a roller coaster, or the characters, each of whom is so memorable, but the sheer physicality of Carey’s writing that makes Theft so good. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.”
–Nancy Connors, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Marvellously enjoyable, wonderful . . . [Carey] has once more written the real thing. [Hugh’s] language is extraordinary . . . The writing is full of sumptuous painterly effects . . . There is a flow of comic incident as the story withholds what it shows and winds around itself under the author’s blissful control. Readers can gratefully share both [Carey’s] high seriousness and his exhilaration.”
–Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times (UK)

“A tale that falls somewhere between The Da Vinci Code and Of Mice and Men . . . Carey indulge[s] all his brilliant ventriloquism, creating a voice quite as vivid as the mesmerizing first person of Ned Kelly in the Booker-winning True History of the Kelly Gang.”
–Tim Adams, The Observer (UK)

“Magnificent . . . Some of the most passionate and electrified prose Carey has ever committed to paper . . . A new Peter Carey novel is cause for joy [and] this [is] Carey’s funniest novel by far . . . There is no better writer of voice working today . . . Carey would certainly be Australia’s second literature Nobel laureate if the prize didn’t seem to reward obscure ponderousness at least as often as true excellence . . . Theft is a novel that will get right up your nose. Carey has produced a humane, gloriously Australian book of grand passion, bad breath and high mischief. It is a rudely brilliant, infuriatingly beautiful, belligerently profane work of art.”
–Patrick Ness, The Guardian

“[Hugh] is a magnificent creation, from the same family of lovable golems as Bob McCorkle in Carey’s previous novel, My Life as a Fake. His lightly punctuated ravings have the ingenuous poetry of the bandit narrator’s voice in the novel before that, True History of the Kelly Gang . . . [Theft] executes the plot conscientiously and cleverly . . . The two brothers, one a genius and the other a simpleton, generate in their streams of utterance a kindred prose, hectic and shambling and given to splashes of Biblical echo and pithy colloquialisms . . . The DNA weave of fraternal kinship is cunningly, affectionately worked . . . Peter Carey is a superb writer, whose prose is always active, and who infuses his characters, however eccentric, with a warmth that lets them live in our minds.”
–John Updike, The New Yorker

“Utterly absorbing . . . Carey’s book is afire with passion, both love and loathing . . . [A] subtle accumulation of clues turns Theft from a love story into a thriller . . . The novel itself is richly ornamented with the tradecraft both of artist and art forger . . . Carey artfully constructs and forcefully delivers [the climax].”
–Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Haunting . . . Carey is a choral group; from novel to novel he soars or plunges from voice to voice, each with its differently piercing note and, for commonality, just a hint of disconcert . . . In Theft Carey has loosed several different voices at once. Each is full-throated and vividly conceived . . . Enticing, arresting.”
–Richard Eder, Boston Globe

“Spot-on . . . When the focus is on art, the prose becomes beautiful and light . . . Butcher is then breathtakingly passionate.”
–Christine Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle

“Sharply observed, well written, and acerbically witty, this book will only further Carey’s reputation.”
–Library Journal

“A funny, gorgeous steal of a book . . . Imagine a cheerful Faulkner, or an even earthier Nabokov. Not possible? Peter Carey is the embodiment of what seems such a literary impossibility, and a writer like no one else in the merry infectiousness, the persuasive relentlessness of his literary energy. In Theft: A Love Story here it is again, ‘the human voice once more in uproar,’ lyrical and foul, biblical and crude, in the now trademark Carey fusion of expertise and wonderful blaggery . . . In the end, it tells an old story, the one where money can’t buy you love, where guile itself is an art, and where art is the ‘limitation of the materials’ plus ‘the true wonder of bloody everything, no less.’ In other words, it is a magic, near-impossible combination–and one that Carey, in another incredible meld of mess and discipline, bombast and quietness, has pulled off and run away with one more time.”
–Ali Smith, Sunday Telegraph

“The best novel I’ve read all year . . . A stinging satire on the seedy intrigues, craven maneuverings and greedy machinations of the art world . . . Written from the competing and often contradictory points of view of the two brothers, each as implausibly awful, as wondrously comic and as faultlessly drawn as the other, you can only wonder at the bravura of the writing and at the dazzling control Carey exercises over his material. This is a riotous, splenetic fantasy of a novel, hard-driven by Carey’s scintillating command of language, a black caper about the power of love and art to redeem . . . Theft’s raging, chewy celebration of life and language, its muscularity and moments of heart-dissolving tenderness are reasons enough to read on, and read again.”
–Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard

“Impressive, taut . . . The voices of the Boone brothers leap off the page with their originality . . . Hugh’s voice reveals itself as an extraordinary, comic and lucid second narrative . . . The two main speakers are brilliantly drawn.”
–Sophie Ratcliffe, The Times (London)

“Devilishly clever . . . Features some of Carey’s best writing to date . . . Carey provides a vivid and beautiful portrait of how art is actually made–and how its vibrations are felt . . . Powerful.”
–John Freeman, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Full of compelling insights couched in fresh, sparkling prose, the aptly titled Theft makes the right moves at the right time. It’s the rare novelistic gem that deserves to crack the divide between commercial success and critical acclaim.”
–Peter Wolfe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“A tale of fame, infatuation and murder, thrillingly rendered in the feisty and fearless prose for which Carey is renowned.”
–Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg

“Carey’s new novel [is] as wily and diverting as the ones before . . . A hard-boiled detective story of sorts, complete with an ingenious conspiracy and a ravishingly deceitful femme fatale . . . The particular treasures offered by Theft are the novel's window into the crass, Byzantine workings of the art market and Michael's semidemonic, but palpably authentic, artistic passion. There are lots of novels that rhapsodize about great paintings, but this one makes you feel the tactile, unprettyfied glory of painting . . . The prose almost throbs. [Carey] does this very hard thing–conveying the genius of one art form in another–so masterfully.”
–Laura Miller, Salon

“Magnificent . . . Given his devious trajectory, a novel about modern art seems like an inevitable destination for Carey. Could there be any more irresisitible house of mirrors for an author fascinated by deceit and subterfuge? . . . Hypnotically brilliant, entirely original.”
–Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World


"The serpentine plot is a brain-squeezing beauty, cunningly elaborated ... But it's the author's mastery of details of artists' lives and the racy energy of his prose that make this edgy, irreverent, often hilariously profane novel soar. In some ways a successor to Carey's impudent picaresque Illywhacker, it's a certifiable hoot. Is the endlessly inventive Carey on the Nobel shortlist? He ought to be."
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Two-time Booker-winner Carey returns with a magnificent high-stakes art heist wrapped around a fraternal saga . . . Scenes in Australia, Japan and New York feature unique forms of fleecing, but setting and action are icing on the emotional core of Carey's newest masterwork."
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Carey creates a whole new world in each novel, and nearly a new language, so fresh and transfixing are the voices of his narrators . . . He is at his satirical best as he mocks the venality of the international art market, and at his most tender in his spirited portrayal of daring misfits who fled the confines of working-class life 'half mad with joy' once they discovered the transformative power of art."
–Booklist (starred review)