Peter Carey

HIS ILLEGAL SELF
By Peter Carey
Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $24.95

Peter Carey is an expat Australian who has lived in New York City for almost 20 years, and it would seem that he’s homesick. Not just for his country, but for what he was when he lived there: a boy, and then a member of that pride of boomers who came of age in the 70’s. And so he’s concocted an unlikely tale whose true arc is to get out of the range of Bloomingdales and into the wilds of Queensland, which he portrays as a ramshackle redoubt for the most disenfranchised of the pot-addled, dropout generation. Here, far from the chic haunts of what used to be called “Bergdorf Goodman hippies,” he elaborates a lengthy double kidnapping.

First our feckless heroine, nicknamed “Dial” (short for dialectic), inadvertently abducts our hero. He’s 7-year-old Che (a child of SDS lefties), and theirs is an Oedipal folie à deux. Dial intends to take him for a visit with his mother, Susan, only to discover that Susan has been (rather conveniently) blown up in some radicalism-gone-wrong in Philadelphia. (Mr. Carey mines actualities of the day for ballast, and for leverage.)  read more »