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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Why, I have sometimes wondered, has the very brilliant, very Australian novelist Peter Carey chosen to live, since 1990, in New York City? Perhaps, I reasoned, it was to gain the exile's significant artistic advantage of enhancement through distance, isolating his homeland from the eroding clutter of ongoing experience. Russia for Nabokov and Ireland for Joyce became luminous reconstructions, shimmering in every lost and recalled detail. But the answer may be simpler than that: if he is anything like the hero and heroine of his newest novel, "Theft: A Love Story" (Knopf; $24), Carey lives in New York to look at pictures. That he is something like his hero, the passionate but passe painter Michael Boone (or Butcher Bones, as he is called by his mentally handicapped younger brother, Hugh, known to his intimates as Slow Bones), seems beyond dispute: Carey and Michael Boone were born the same year, 1943, and in the same place, Bacchus Marsh, a town northwest of Melbourne. Butcher expresses, with fiction's inevitable hyperbole, an Australian cultural grievance he shares with the love of his life, Marlene Leibovitz, nee Cook:
We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist, until we slipped beneath the gate or burnt down the porter's house, or jemmied the bathroom window, and then we saw what had been kept from us, in our sleepouts, in our outside dunnies, our drafty beer-hoppy public bars, and then we went half mad with joy.
Half mad, too, with ambition and rapacious dreams of gaining attention and riches in the cultural centers--Paris and London, New York and Tokyo--far from Down Under's sea-girt isolation. Marlene, who comes from a town "not much bigger than Bacchus Marsh" called Benalla, where her mother ran a coffee shop, feels her...
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