Based on the New Yorker review of Peter Carey’s latest novel, they clearly adore the Australian writer who has chosen Manhattan as his home.
The review hails Parrot & Olivier in America as “a delicious, sprockety contrapation, a comic historical picaresque that takes its creative origin in Tocqueville and Beaumont’s 1831 journey” through America.
But the New Yorker are habitually hysterical about Carey. On My Life as a Fake they gushed it was “so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling in its plot”.
When it came to Theft: A Love Story the reviewer speculated that Carey left Australia to “gain the exile’s significant artistic advantage of enhancement through distance, isolating his homeland from the eroding clutter of ongoing experience.” If Carey has been banished to New York for his art, he seems a happy exile having called it home for almost 20 years.
