In an interview with The Guardian in 2001, Australian author Peter Carey commented that after turning 50, he came to realize that his work was full of orphans, metaphorical and actual. Carey's latest novel, Theft, subtitled "A Love Story," is no exception. Theft tells the unusual romance of a disillusioned Australian artist, Michael Boone, nicknamed "Butcher Bones," and an alluring con-artist by the name of Marlene Leibovitz, wife of the son of famous and successful artist Jacques Leibovitz. From the start, the history of Butcher Bones is haunted by events and circumstances that inevitably mangle him into orphanhood. Imprisoned by the memory of a dead eight-year-old son and a failed marriage that resulted in the loss of acquired prestige and possessions, Butcher Bones commences his "love story...that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff." Stripped of family, fame and fortune, the artist's orphanhood is further heightened by a sense of placelessness and purposelessness which set the tone for the entire novel: "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..."

Had it not been for Carey's subtitle, out of such depths, I would have expected a story of artistic rebirth and re-emergence—a Bildungsroman for the artist today. After all, Carey credits James Joyce as one of the greatest influences upon his work, along with Faulkner and Beckett. Despite the insistence upon the "love story," Carey's work resounds with fascination about art and its various meanings in the modern world, and is arguably the story of artistic discovery and re-emergence catalyzed by a love story. Still, Theft is far from being a narrative that charts a phoenix rising from the ashes (though this is how Butcher Bones's damaged brother will describe him at the end of the novel). The novel is extremely difficult to place; it is truly at once a love story, a tragedy, a comedy, a tragicomedy, and an artist's journey. At times, the chameleon-like properties of Carey's work make it an overwhelming and emotionally taxing read—its episodic chapters are infused with melancholy, sensuality, brutality, and exquisite beauty. However, Carey manages to maintain a haunting balance among these elements by means of a resonance that enters and inhabits his work; specifically, Carey's work resonates with orphanhood, with a brilliant sense of loneliness that gives the work its true essence and character.

In a sense, Carey's lonely artist, disillusioned and isolated from the world of dilettantish art dealers and bourgeois connoisseurs is nothing new, but Butcher Bones's intense love for a woman criminal who is ambiguously part of, and apart from this world significantly complicates the artist's relationship with his external circumstances. Marlene Leibovitz wears Manolo Blahnik shoes, is at the center of complicated schemes of art theft, and uses her powerful marital connections to authenticate "false" art, yet she has an eye for art that Butcher respects and admires as genuine. When Butcher discovers that his newfound linkages to the "art world" are in fact inextricably bound with Marlene's schemes, he surprisingly finds that he loves her even more, and he himself becomes wrapped up in producing "false" art for his love to authenticate.

Despite such complications in the artist's relationship with society engendered by the "love story," what overrides all is the sense that Butcher Bones is incurably alone. Formalistically, one of the novel's most striking features is that the narrative is shared between Butcher and his brother Hugh; their two subjectivities serve to heighten the sense of loneliness and isolation that infuses the novel. Though Hugh gets almost as much narrative space as his brother in terms of chapters told, it is clear that the novel belongs to Butcher. Thus, when Hugh's narratives, which read predominantly like post-colonial montages of misappropriated slang and cultural bric-a-brac, contain moments of simple and unexpected clarity regarding his brother's condition, Butcher's isolation and entrapped consciousness are thrown into painful relief.

Carey 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 . He seems as at home writing about his hometown of Bacchus Marsh, a small community of agricultural origins (whence Butcher Bones hails) as he is writing about the metropolitan art worlds of Tokyo and New York . At times, Carey's landscapes, like his assemblage of Hugh's chapters, move into the territory of esoteric abundance, but these moments do not undermine the authority of what was clearly a meticulously researched and carefully considered project. Butcher Bones, sadly, would never be able to navigate such worlds with the familiarity that Carey has demonstrated in his latest literary accomplishment.

Ultimately, what seems to be at stake for the artist in Carey's novel are the questions of what makes something authentic, the purpose of artistic production, and how the artist relates to a world that he is so inextricably bound up with, yet isolated from. To be sure, many of Carey's characters are stock enemies of the artist-individual — the obnoxious and ignorant Detective, and the power-hoarding, name-obsessive art dealers. But Carey's story is not of the artist versus such enemies, nor is it of the artist struggling to define himself amidst the tangled mire that Marlene has dragged him into. At the heart of Carey's achievement is the profundity of isolation—the sacred, inviolable inscrutability of an individual's subjectivity.

Amy Wong '06 will be gingerly making an appearance in the real world next fall