The Thieves Of Manhattan
Ian Minot came to New York with dreams of being a published author. Five years later, he’s in his thirties and still pushing double lattes at Morningside Coffee. He’s all but stopped writing, now that enough agents and editors have told him they don’t want any more of his sluggish stories, all drawn from his sluggish life.
Ian has also quit moonlighting as a cater-waiter at beau monde literary events, where he once made a sport of sidling up to publishing rainmakers and pampered wunderkinds, who are somehow always named Jonathan.
Meanwhile, his twenty-something Romanian girlfriend is tearing up the town with her new book about refugee life. Soon she’ll be running off with Blade, a millions-selling memoirist who’s throwing the public off his obvious suburban scent by flashing fake gang signs and selling a spiel about how he’s straight out of Compton and Rikers.
Amid this drear, Ian meets a mysterious malcontent in Jonathan Franzen glasses named Jed Roth, who also holds a grudge against Blade and his imposter ilk. Jed lures Ian into a plot to bring down publishing-industry "truthiness" forever by hiring Ian to put his own name on one of Roth’s own outlandish, unpublished potboilers, which he will pass off as a memoir. As part of Roth’s master plan to foment even more scandal in the industry, Ian intends to come clean about how his memoir is pure fiction once sales peak, thereby setting off a media circus that will debase today’s purveyors of trash and seal his own career with even more seven-figure advances.
The novel takes a most surreal turn, however, when Ian starts living out the exact same gonzo events contained in Roth’s overblown crime-fiction-novel-cum-(Ian’s)-memoir. It turns out, for reasons never explained, that Roth has some diabolical ability to author Ian’s life now that Ian has contracted to pull off his grift. Not only that, but everybody in Ian’s life is starting to reveal themselves to be the opposite of what he’s always known them to be, whether they’re involved in Roth’s scheme or not.
Adam Langer’s The Thieves of Manhattan is as clever a quick read as you can ever ask for. His character Ian is hilariously hapless and self-deprecating. The book crackles with humor and insight into not only publishing industry corruption (two chapters bear the titles of James Frey books), but also the history of modern literature.
Ian Minot gets steeped in a criminal underworld in which Borges’ magical realism meets the hardboiled gumshoe noir of Raymond Chandler. Fortunately, Ian has probably read more books than Harold Bloom, so he can usually stay a step ahead of the multiple plot twists kinking up all around him. So literate is he, that he uses the names of famous authors and characters as nouns and verbs: a highsmith is a train; a gogol is an overcoat; a chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego) is dirty sex; a proust is a bed; a golightly is a tight-fitting black dress; and he calls a handgun a canino, an allusion to the villain in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, even as he’s about to be pistol-whipped under elevated subway tracks in Harlem.
Don’t worry if you can’t catch all the references, there’s a glossary in back!
For however much Ian shares Roth’s disdain for publishers’ lowbrow pandering, he gives one of the most eloquent defenses of truthiness ever written:
"The problem with trying to write about reality [was that] the modern human condition didn’t follow the arc of a good plot: characters appeared then drifted away; conflicts remained unresolved; imaginary love affairs stayed imaginary...."
Yet, Langer’s book itself is far more successful when Ian muddles through life in humdrum dorkiness, than when he becomes the swashbuckling hero of a casehardened demimonde.
by Adam Langer
