The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,24

I liked most about A Thief in Manhattan were Roth’s knowing literary references, the sorts of details that might have seemed precious to some readers, but not to a librarian’s son. Throughout, Roth employed a literary sort of slang; he called an overcoat a “gogol,” a smile a “cheshire,” and an umbrella a “poppins.” He called trains “highsmiths,” because they appeared so often in Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers, and referred to money as “daisies,” since in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Daisy Buchanan’s voice as being “full of money.” At the end of Roth’s manuscript, he included a glossary of literary terms, but I didn’t need to consult it much; the only one I didn’t get was “canino,” Roth’s word for a gun, which he took from the name of a heavy in The Big Sleep, a book I had never read.

References to books appeared on nearly every page of Roth’s novel. When the reader first encountered the foul-mouthed manuscript appraiser Iola Jaffe, she was looking up from the Riverside Shakespeare, specifically Act III, Scene ii, of Othello, where Iago tells the Moor, “Men should be as they seem.” In the novel’s climactic moment, when it appeared the hero was about to be shot dead by Norbert Piels, he was able to wrest the gun away, shoot his adversaries, Piels and Jaffe, then hop an 8:13 train, 813 being the Dewey decimal number assigned to fiction. The longitude and latitude of The Tale of Genji’s location corresponded to the Dewey numbers for illustrated books and foreign reference works. I knew that Roth’s book was probably filled with more clues and in-jokes I wasn’t getting, but I was reading too quickly to try to figure out all of them.

I kept turning pages, reliving all the parts of the adventure Roth had told me, feeling surprised by all the plot twists that he hadn’t. I felt “Roth”’s passion for the Girl in the Library, his sorrow at the sight of the Blom reduced to rubble after Norbert set it ablaze in a fit of rage upon realizing that Roth had stolen The Tale of Genji; I felt my heart thump when Roth was being chased by Iola and Norbert, felt both horror and catharsis when Roth shot them dead, then buried them in the desolate field beneath a golden cross, and I felt elated when Roth was about to be reunited with the Girl in the Library. And when I read the last page and its final, charmingly hokey line, a question spoken in darkness by the Girl—“True love never has to end, so why shouldn’t our story continue after the last page has been written?”—I couldn’t help but think that Roth was talking about not only one love affair and one story, but about all stories, for a good story never has to end when it lives on in our minds. And I couldn’t help but think that the reason why lately I had such trouble finishing stories was not because I wanted them to go on and on, but because I never really knew how to begin one. I wished I could learn how to start a story and see it through to the end so clearly that it could live on after the last page.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

“So?” Roth asked. I put the manuscript down on the coffee table and took a long look out at his view of Riverside Park.

“So what?” I asked.

“So, what do you think?”

I considered, then told Roth the truth, that I thought A Thief in Manhattan was a good story. To earn the five hundred dollars that was still on the coffee table, I told him that the book was a little violent and amoral for my tastes. Then I made some obvious points about his story’s plausibility: I said that maybe I wouldn’t have made all the Dewey decimal references—one was fun; three was overkill. I told him that I had a basic sense of most of the characters, but maybe Roth could have described the Girl in the Library better and told more about what happened after his hero reunited with her. Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels were amusing foils, but without knowing their backstories or motivations, I ultimately grew weary of Iola’s profane rants and Norbert’s cruelty; I saw only glimmers of their humanity, never saw them as fully realized characters. The hero, too, Roth, wasn’t sufficiently defined. I said that I couldn’t tell whether the character was supposed to be