One of the good things about the contemporary thriller is the access it offers to the underbellies of the modern city - to the Chinatowns or Latin Quarters where life goes on at a tangent to the mainstream. In Sleight of Hand, Elizabeth Wassell's second novel, it is the subculture of bohemian SoHo in downtown Manhattan which provides the colour and context for a story of love, deception and betrayal woven through a self-regarding, cocaine-snorting community of artists.
When art historian Claire Browne takes a job as archivist to the eminent painter Simon Brady, both her heart and her head are on the line. Is Simon, a serial adulterer, capable of real love for her? Is the newly-discovered painting to which he leads her a genuine Moreno, or a clever fake?
The plot is a little creaky, with sadistic pimp and gold-hearted whore filling in the technical gaps, but this doesn't really matter much. Wassell's main concern is the ethical landscape which her characters inhabit, and this is well-drawn in a microcosmic study of America's decline from the altruistic '60s to the vanity and cynicism of the late '80s. The miserable plight of Claire's frail, immigrant parents, bereft of any real community, fades into the shallow hedonism and smug egoism of Greenwich Village aesthetes and socialites, while the putative Moreno painting, which depicts the mythical Narcissus, comes to represent a society paralysed by self-love and a cataclysmic failure to recognise the Other. Wassell has done well to shed the picaresque Ireland of her debut novel, The Honey Plain, and the result is a much more accomplished fiction. Thematically, Sleight of Hand is quite contrived, stylistically it can labour under a surfeit of painterly allusions, but it is an engaging read, rich in local colour, strong on emotional detail and bitten with dark social satire.
Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College, Dublin