Five of the eight reviews I’ve read of Peter Carey’s Theft specifically remark upon the pricey Manolo Blahnik heels in which Marlene Leibovitz—the novel’s femme fatale—strides into the narrative. While her fancy shoes are emblematic of a specific modernity, of material entitlement and women’s elevation to a height more equitable with men, while they are synecdochic of her drive, her elegance and undeniable sexual allure, there is much more to Marlene Leibovitz than the high heels she holds in hand as she crosses a boggy Australian pasture into “Butcher� Boone’s life.

Theft: A Love Story is Carey’s ninth novel, and may well be my favorite. Such a claim is not easily made, given the author’s outstanding oeuvre. Born near Melbourne in 1943 but having lived in New York for the past fifteen years, Carey is author of the Dickensian Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the powerful and innovatively narrated True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)—both Booker Prize winners—as well as the incisive page-turner My Life as a Fake (2003). In Theft, Carey readers will welcome new treatment of now-familiar questions of authorship in art, the role of commercial markets in shaping value, and inverted definitions of criminality … all well-grounded in the thorny issue of Australian identity within a global community.

As is much Carey, Theft is skillfully narrated in the first person, though by dual protagonists. Australian brothers, Michael and Hugh Boone (known as “Butcher Bones� and “Slow Bones� respectively) together chronicle the revival of Butcher’s once-illustrious career as a painter of bold, passionate works in the 1970’s. The rough-hewn, physically large brothers share an intimate connection, Butcher acting as keeper of Hugh, an idiot-savant whose specific diagnosis is never revealed. Although Hugh narrates only a third the work, his chapters are characterized by clever use of capitalization and often lyrical insight due to his unique mental state, as well as the noteworthy habit of breaking the pinky fingers of individuals who threaten the Boones. The brothers’ unlikely bond is tested when ambitious and lovely Marlene arrives at the remote house where a passé Butcher is attempting to re-kindle his career. It works, Butcher’s talent managed by Marlene, an authenticator (and co-forger) of art who becomes his lover. Butcher’s latest paintings enjoy unusual—and suspect—success during a show in Japan, after which the lovers reunite with Hugh in New York, the pinnacle of the art world in the early 1980’s, where more explicit deception and violence ensue.

Marlene, instigating much of the turmoil, plays a smaller role than either Boone brother, and yet it was she who captivated me. This isn’t all that surprising, considering the long line of strong women in Carey’s novels. In Oscar and Lucinda, it is Lucinda who ultimately thrives as she manipulates the burgeoning glass industry, navigates continents, and attains financial and social independence (though not love). Poor Oscar, meanwhile, falls into Carey’s renegade son pattern, rejecting his father’s Plymouth Brethren Christianity for Anglicism … only to literally drown under the transparent glass church that he delivers to the outback on Lucinda’s behalf. The source of Lucinda’s considerable strength is her intelligent, resourceful mother, the model for the competent female figures who subsequently populate True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, and Theft. In Kelly Gang, our Australian outlaw makes clear the enormous debt to his venerated mother while penning an epistolary explanation of the family history for his daughter, the repository of familial truth. In My Life, a determined literary editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass (who is British but whose mother is Australian), is not only given the powerful position of narrator, but also acts as an agent of truth when she travels to Asia to unravel the complicated hoax at the novel’s center.

In Theft, influential women play equally important roles, but with significantly increased complexity. To begin with, the Boone boys sympathize with their honorable, if victimized, mother while vilifying their abusive, alcoholic father. Butcher has rejected his patrimony by refusing—despite his moniker—to work in the family butcher shop (Carey’s mention that the family shop has become a video store by 1981, an enterprise doomed to failure, is typical of the author’s masterful depth in its astute commentary on market-driven obsolescence). In perpetual conflict with his father, which is symbolic of our protagonist’s discontent with his fatherland, Butcher is influenced by his God-fearing mother whose fire-and-brimstone meditations he incorporates verbatim into his paintings. Likewise, Dominique Broussard, mother of Olivier Liebovitz and Marlene’s mother-in-law, wields significant power by appropriating her late husband Jacques’s oeuvre, this maternal figure’s criminality sparking Theft’s skillfully convoluted plot.

While these Theft mothers’ influence is considerable, it is Marlene’s marked complexity that signals an evolution in Carey’s depiction of the fairer sex. Even women as prominent as Lucinda or as central to a novel as My Life’s Sarah—even the bootlegging mother in Kelly Gang—have been good. Before Theft, Carey’s women have served as foils for men who suffer crises of national identity, criminal definition, arbitrary capitalist markets, religious conflict and more. With Marlene, however, Carey creates a woman whose ethical contradictions drive the novel’s plot. This cunning self-made appraiser manipulates her husband’s legal right to authenticate his famous father’s work, she deceives Butcher about his Japanese show, she breaks into houses and apartments, and has paintings bought and sold and forged. Marlene constitutes the novel’s crux, despite being filtered through the brothers; despite appearing in far fewer scenes than the men; and despite John Updike’s claim that, “we tend to lose sight of her amid the frolic of the Boone brothers’ giddy unbuttoned, reminiscing monologues� (The New Yorker, 05-29-2006). Adored by Butcher and Hugh, as well as by several minor male characters, Marlene has disguised her humble Australian origins so well that Butcher initially assumes she is American. We are seduced along with Butcher who articulates his dedication: “I was happy, of course I was bloody happy. I was grateful. I loved her, more than the eyelashes and cheeks, her tenderness, her generosity, and—even if this sounds weird—her guile. I was at home with her, with her light, slight body, her bottomless eyes.�

And yet this woman is guilty of adultery, theft, forgery and worse! In Carey’s dexterous hands, though, we forgive Marlene—unsurprising from an author whose “Down Under� perspective involves inversions of many notions, including criminality. Integral to this sympathy is Carey’s demonstration that both Butcher and Marlene maintain deep reverence for art despite what both perceive as their cultural disadvantage. Says Butcher (with verbiage that reflects the clash both he and Marlene experience between their artistic sensibilities and their humble origins),

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 sleep-outs, in our outside dunnies, our drafty beer-hoppy public bars, and then we went half mad with joy.

We had lived not knowing that Van Gogh was born, or Vermeer or Holbein, or dear sad Max Beckmann, but once we knew, we staked our lives on theirs. (228)

Butcher’s fervor is moving, though slightly less complex than his female counterpart’s. While he has talent (recognized, discounted, then resurrected by an external value-producing market), Marlene shares only his disadvantage. Although Butcher received his only training from a high school art teacher and never saw an original work of art until he left Australia, Marlene lacks even his aptitude. She connives her way into the art world serendipitously, via a secretarial job where she meets her future husband, Olivier, son of a cubist master. Despite cultural obstacles, however, the Australians’ mutual appreciation for art transcends the arbitrary, mercenary nature of commercial markets. With Butcher’s more explicit evocation of their passion, readers appreciate the emotional response of art-lovers before a skilled canvas:

[W]e sat there until the early morning, … the rain drumming on the roof, and I relaxed, finally, while this strange and lovely woman described the entire canvas for me, speaking in a low soft throaty voice, beginning, not at the top left-hand corner, but with the cadmium yellow stroke which marks the edge of the young wife’s blouse, a slice of light. (32)

Because of her passionate commitment to art and to her lover, Marlene evokes sympathetic understanding in the reader. Although protagonists Butcher and Hugh dominate much of Theft: A Love Story, it is Marlene who makes for the novel’s depth. Whether a longtime Carey fan or new to his work, readers will be compelled to learn what immoral but fascinating development Marlene might suggest because they will believe Butcher, who says, “When she stood in front of art with me, she told the truth� (211).