I can't seem to read another online newpaper, or magazine, without coming across a review of Carey's Theft. If his publishers are keeping track of the review clippings then they're doing a pretty good job. It's turning into a hefty volume.
The latest one to come to light (to me at least) is one of the best: a James Wood review in "The London Review of Books". I don't see much point in commenting on this one, I'll just pick a few highlights.
"As he did in his last novel, My Life as a Fake, about the Ern Malley hoax, Carey delights in stripping authorship of authority, and in floating the heretical notion that the reader - or the market - may be the final author of the work."
"Carey likes these intricate, spangly plots, with their outrageous truancies from verisimilitude and their lizard-like velocity; he is one of the most fantastical storytellers in the language, and yet the stories are not unreal, and this is partly why readers can never decide who he is like: is it Dickens, or Joyce, or Kafka, or Faulkner, or Nabokov, or García Márquez, or Rushdie? Two of the realisms that ground these dense fantasies are Carey's ability to animate even minor characters with a flick of novelistic attention, and his great interest in the warped reality of spoken language. One of the great familiar pleasures of his new novel is the way the language recklessly mixes different registers into a vivid democracy, now high and now low, but always interestingly rich.."
"The jovial cynicism of Theft, and its poststructuralist scepticism about the necessary presence of the author in a work of art, seem rather easy achievements for Carey, not least because he dealt with them so nimbly in My Life as a Fake. As in that book, the real subject - Carey's abiding subject, addressed in novel after novel - is the hoax of Australian identity, and its self-tortured relationship with the rest of the world."
