http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Crime-and-Punishment/The-Face-Thief/ba-p/6699
By ELI GOTTLIEB
Reviewed by Anna Mundow
January 16, 2012
Eli Gottlieb's The Face Thief opens with a
hurtling descent -- a woman falls down a lengthy staircase -- and ends with a
smooth takeoff as her transatlantic flight leaves New York. We don't know,
until the novel's denouement, how she fell or whether she was pushed. We are
never told where her flight will land. But between these two events, Gottlieb
constructs a sublime thriller that might have been subtitled "A portrait
of the con artist as a young woman." On a deeper level (and there are
many) The Face Thief is also an elegant and profound novel of memory,
perception, and reinvention.
"The real reason we have faces,"
Margot Lassiter observes, "is to hold back what we're thinking from the
world." Margot's business is deception, and Gottlieb, appropriately,
reveals her life in fragments as he advances the plot in flashbacks, causing
time to stutter as it loops back on itself. This is how Margot's damaged memory
returns, gradually and fitfully, as she recovers from her fall in hospital and
rehab, under the eye of a besotted cop. Yet Gottlieb never indulges his
cleverness. We are not dazzled by his style. We are instead seduced, from the
moment that Margot sights the first of two victims, men we come to know
intimately as she reels them in and leaves them floundering.
She meets Lawrence Billings at a seminar he
leads on "The Physique of Finance: The Art of Face Reading and Body
Language for Professional Advantage." (Gottlieb's ear for
business-inspirational rhetoric is flawless). Billings, fifty-three and married,
has a gift for decoding human behavior. "Even as a boy, he'd understood
the commonness of lying. People did it as naturally as singing." But
Margot, a young volunteer from the audience who soon requests private
instruction, teaches Billings a new lesson in the old game of seduction and
extortion. "She leaned toward him…. He was feeling his own thoughts
turning slow, syrupy…" Billings will pay, of course, and far more than he
imagines.
John Potash is, for Margot, an easier mark.
Middle-aged and blissfully remarried in California, he wants to believe that
his substantial nest egg will be significantly enhanced when invested in the
firm represented by "Janelle Styles." Greenleaf, after all, is not
some hedge fund but "…a consortium of forward-seeking investment advisers
and analysts from elite business schools who roamed the world seeking the
latest cutting-edge sustainable products."
Gottlieb so deftly directs the parallel dramas
of Billings and Potash that each has the compressed urgency of a short story.
The textures of his characters' lives -- of even minor characters such as
Potash's mother in the Bronx or the eccentric P.I. he hires -- rise off the
page with tactile intensity. Potash opens "the heavy vault of the fridge
door..." A bedside television flickers and drones on "…for hours
without consequence, like a drunk at a bar." Then there is Margot -- one
of crime fiction's most mesmerizing grifters -- reinventing herself first as a
Smith College student, then as a Manhattan style magazine "editor at
large...superalert, usually in heels, and gunning it, hard." Gottlieb
draws us so completely into Margot's mind and the minds of her prey that the
identity of a possible avenger (remember those stairs?) seems almost
incidental. But he leaves no loose ends as he smoothly accelerates into the
final curve, where deed and consequence silkily merge.
Judul Asli: The Face Thief: A Novel
Penulis: Eli Gottlieb
Penerjemah: Sri Noor Verawaty
Diterbitkan Oleh: Pustaka Alvabet
Cetakan Pertama:
Bahasa Asli: Inggris
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