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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Rebecca Mead on the marriage market
Peter Carey's new novel, "My Life as a Fake" (Knopf; $24), is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling in its plot that something, we feel, must be wrong with it. It ends in a bit of a rush, and left several questions dangling in this reader's mind. Unfortunately, to spell out those questions would be to betray too much of an intricate fictional construct where little is as it first seems and fantastic developments unfold like scenes on a fragile paper fan. To be brief: the narrator and heroine is Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, the spinster editor of the London avant-garde journal The Modern Review, who in August of 1985 sits down in Berkshire to recount an adventure that befell her thirteen years before, in Malaysia, when an old friend of her family's, the poet and novelist John Slater, twenty years her senior, persuaded her to accompany him to Kuala Lumpur for a week. Thus, she writes, she "entered that maze from which, thirteen years later, I have yet to escape."
At the center of the maze lies an old Australian literary scandal, the so-called McCorkle Hoax, in which, in 1946, an obscure and, because obscure, bitter poet named Christopher Chubb passed off parodic verses of his own as the work of an authentic poet-of-the-people, the imaginary Bob McCorkle. McCorkle is supposedly dead, and his mighty works have been timidly brought forward by his unsophisticated...
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