12 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020THE THRILLER GENREis premised less on
subject matter than on the direct promise
of a sensational response. Unlike, say,
crime or western or romance, with a
thriller there’s no hint at what will happen,
or where it will happen, or whom it will
happen to. There’s only the pledge that,
once it happens, you will be — or should be
— thrilled.“Love and Theft,” the second novel by
Stan Parish, is a thriller. It wastes no time
making its intentions known. The story
opens on a kaleidoscopic set piece worthy
of a James Bond movie as directed by
Robert Altman: Four sleek and helmeted
motorcyclists attempt a brazen jewel heist
(really, is there any other kind of fictional
jewel heist?) at a high-end boutique off the
Vegas strip. We track the action through
the eyes of nearly a dozen disparate char-
acters: a beat cop, a 911 operator, a mani-
curist tripping on Ecstasy, a pair of sad-
sack gamblers, a valet and a gawping fifth
grader, among others. This opening gam-
bit is exciting, if slightly worrisome. Whom
are we meant to invest in here? Will there
be characters for us to care about? Don’t
worry. They’re on their way.
The first is Rider 1, the leader of the heist
gang. His name is Alex Cassidy and we
meet him in a very different circumstance,
as the novel cuts quickly to a ketamine
party at the home of a groovy doctor in
Princeton, N.J. Alex is tall, handsome, a lit-
tle beat-up, an incidental expert at hand-
to-hand combat; he claims, among polite
company, to work in “event production.”
The other attendee of note is Diane, clad in
a Joy Division T-shirt, her face “bare and
beautiful.” Naturally, she’s skeptical of
Alex but also intrigued. We’ve seen the
theft — this is the love.Alex and Diane begin a courtship. She
pieces together their unlikely past connec-
tion, involving a former best friend who
came to an untimely end. The outlines of
Alex’s livelihood come into focus, for her
and for us. Misgivings are expressed, in
degrees of vehemence. Everyone heads off
to Tulum, Mexico. The F.B.I. circles and,
soon, the specter of One Last Job looms.
In lesser thrillers, this necessary erec-
tion of plot scaffolding can be tedious, the
impatient reader skimming ahead while
waiting for the bullets to start flying. But
character back story, and the entangle-
ments it reveals, seem to be where Parish’s
true interests lie: the lives of battered peo-
ple, looking for absolution or, failing that,
some form of shelter, maybe in one an-
other.
His other interest is language — and
“Love and Theft” is expertly and (a rarer
accomplishment) artfully written. At one
point, at a different party, Alex observes a
magazine editor and thinks, “I should have
been an editor, I have varied interests and
a facility with language, can there be more
to it than that?” Parish would know: He’s
worked at Vanity Fair, GQ and The Wall
Street Journal, and he apparently used
that time — and I say this as someone
who’s spent years in the magazine salt
mines — to hone a knack for high-gloss
sentences. The clientele at one expensive
restaurant is described with a merciless
eye: “The crowd was older, filled with
tanned, substantial men in French-cuff
shirts and women with elaborate hair and
heavy jewelry. Everyone seemed to be
laughing at once.”
This attention to sentence-by-sentence
pleasure is an undervalued, even dis-
dained, skill among thriller writers, too
many of whom excuse a clunky, utilitarian
style as “unvarnished.” They sacrifice
style at the altar of momentum. But a pre-
cision-cut sentence can quicken the read-
er’s pulse as reliably as a surprise twist or
a character’s excruciating dilemma. When
a novel delivers all of the above — as “Love
and Theft” ultimately does, its racecar en-
gine revving to a smooth and satisfying
purr — it can feel to the reader like a kind of
miracle. In a word: thrilling. 0To Catch a Thief
A Vegas jewel heist goes off perfectly. Or does it?
By ADAM STERNBERGHTHE HEADS OF STATELOVE AND THEFT
By Stan Parish
256 pp. Doubleday. $25.95.ADAM STERNBERGH’Smost recent novel is “The
Blinds.”THIS ARTFUL MEDITATIONon memory and
identity centers on a woman who has just
arrived at the Meadowlark Institute for
Memory Research in 1999. Wendy Doe has
no identification, no memory and no one
looking for her — who is she?
Lizzie Epstein is a bright young re-
search fellow at the institute. At the behest
of the Meadowlark’s founder, Dr. Benjamin
Strauss, she decides to focus her work on
Wendy Doe — a decision that will change
the trajectory of her life, not always for the
better. Strauss, who is brilliant and proud
of it, becomes the center of Lizzie’s orbit.
She begins to lose track of whether she’s
smart and curious or whether she’s those
things only when Strauss says that she is.
By contrast, the men in the book are bliss-
fully static. “A lifetime ago I was somebody
else,” says a grown-up Lizzie. “Benjamin
was still Benjamin. Benjamin was a con-
stant, axiomatic.”
In the novel’s other timeline, set in the
present, the woman who Wendy Doe has
become in the intervening 20-odd years
has gone missing again, this time pre-
sumed dead. Her daughter, Alice, search-
ing for answers, finds Lizzie — now Eliza-
beth, Strauss’s widow. Alice triggers Eliza-
beth to dig up answers of her own and fi-
nally face the reality that Strauss might
not have been such a wonderful mentor
(or husband) after all.
The polyphonic narrative structure
feels suitable for a novel that draws heav-
ily on musical composition, particularly
Bach’s fugues, which Wasserman adeptly
uses to illustrate the tractile nature of
memory. And though the middle of the
book requires some patience, there are
plenty of philosophical threads to tease out
and ponder along the way: Why do we as-
sume continuity across time, but not
space? Is it logical to assume that our past
self is the same as our present one? Can
there be a self with no memory? Why do
we forget some memories and remember
others and if what we remember shapes
us, would we be entirely different if we re-
membered differently?
The lives of the four narrators — Lizzie,
Wendy, Alice and Elizabeth — intersect to
reveal one big, satisfying secret, a truth
that resolves one of Wasserman’s burning
questions: What would happen if we could
convince ourselves that our most trau-
matic memories occurred to someone
else? The answer: Forgetting, no matter
how complete, isn’t the same as erasure.
Wasserman’s ability to weave big ideas
seamlessly into plot is impressive. The re-
sult is a warning against the dangers of let-
ting others warp our identities while re-
maining cleareyed about the importance
and inescapability of human connection.
Even Wendy, who acts as an allegorical
baseline against which the novel’s other
women measure, only exists because an-
other woman lost her mind.
The most nuanced relationship is be-
tween Lizzie and her childhood best friend,
Gwen. Their friendship fractures as Gwen
becomes a mother and then again as Gwen
holds a mirror up for Lizzie: Look at who
you are; now look at who you are with
Strauss. While Wasserman doesn’t end the
book with the same bloodshed that capped
off her adult debut, “Girls on Fire,” she still
leaves readers with the feeling that ero-
sion of self is a fate worth fearing. 0Fugue State
A woman has no ID, no memory and no one looking for her.
By CHANDLER BAKER
MOTHER DAUGHTER WIDOW WIFE
By Robin Wasserman
336 pp. Scribner. $27.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NINA SUBINRobin WassermanCHANDLER BAKER’Smost recent book is “Whis-
per Network.”