Brilliant Peter Carey, two-time Man Booker Prize winner, has written another marvelous novel. “Theft: A Love Story” (Knopf, 269 pages, $24) is a hilarious romp through the corrupt world of art dealers (“the most larcenous people on earth”) and art authenticators.
This plotless picaresque navigates the duplicities of collectors, critics, lawyers and hangers-on. Facilitating the thievery, the endless reduction of art to commerce, are the extended family members of great artists like Jacques Leibovitz. They wield the “droit moral,” the power to authenticate a painting.
Before this mad caper of a story draws to a close, indefatigable “Butcher” (Michael Boone), the Australian painter at the heart of the story, has become a forger himself, forging work by Leibovitz, whose work he has revered, even as Leibovitz is revealed to have forged Rembrandts.
Butcher is joined by his obstreperous charge, his idiot-savant brother Hugh, who, with his searing, down-to-earth observations, all but steals the book. The book alternates sections from each man’s point of view. Hugh, a lumbering man who penetrates all pretense, is, of course, far more humane than the artist for whom nothing truly matters but his art. Butcher can watch a puppy drown, worrying only about how he will control Hugh’s grief. Butcher is the stereotypic artist for whom his art comes first.
Yet Carey demands that we root for Butcher, not least when he exults that his paintings “could still bite your leg off and spit the crunchy pieces on the floor.”
Butcher also retains the reader’s sympathy because he loves his uncontrollable brother, even as Hughcannot help but admire the artist whose “labor never ends, no peace, no Sabbath, just eternal churning and cursing and worrying and fretting.”
Butcher and Hugh are joined in their madcap adventures by Marlene, estranged daughter-in-law of Leibovitz’s son Olivier. Seemingly a fragile, tender blond, Marlene turns out to be gifted at manipulating the “droit moral,” as Carey exposes how an uneducated hanger-on can seize control of “what was art and what was not,” only to emerge “in charge of history.”
Carey’s virtuoso language dramatizes that Butcher is the real thing. Joyously, he discovers the right paints, even in backwater Australia. Besotted by color, he describes greens as “dark satanic black holes that could suck your heart out of your chest.” Artists are enchanted by paint: “Just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white.”
“Theft: A Love Story,” is witty, urbane, funny and profound, down to its last searing line: “How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?”
