Identity Theft
A Novel
Preface
Notes for Harassed Reviewers
Who have no Time to Read Entire Novels
This is the story of Dan Richards, a once happy teacher living in Mystic, Connecticut. In his spare time, Dan is writing a novel on Thailand but is lured by a clever mother (Julia Willeford) and her two, fabulously fetching teenage daughters (Deborah and Babs) into degradation and humiliation. And it is also the story of Stephen Avery, a mild-mannered insurance actuary living in Bangkok, or rather who lives inside the novel on Thailand being written by Dan Richards. It is also the story of the Bangkok bar manager, West Texas Andy, who also exists inside Dan’s novel; and – unable to resist an appearance – it is the story of and apparently by Dean Barrett who is writing a novel (this one) about this teacher supposedly living in Mystic, Connecticut, and so on, and so forth.
Other characters include a Catholic priest who may or may not have done something rather reprehensible (but certainly, given their wanton natures, completely justifiable) with Deborah and Babs; several wacky, lust-filled nurses and nutty, lascivious surgeons – the type whom you would definitely not want operating on you; Colonel William Ledyard, who fought the British during the Revolutionary War and is still at it; and, of course, last but not least, this being a novel set mainly in Thailand, there is Lek, the obligatory (but quite unusual) go go dancer. Lek, as we shall see, not only tantalizes Stephen Avery to the point of near-insanity, but is so alluring, so enticing, and so incredibly sexy, that even Dean Barrett takes her to bed which may be the first time in literary history that an author has slept with one of his characters. As a patient reader will discover, Lek not only uses her intelligence and sexual power to manipulate chapters and events, but eventually criticizes the quality of the novel she is forced to be in to such an extent that the author is obliged to use footnotes to defend himself.
Identity Theft deals with the horrors of Alzheimer’s and in particular the stress on the caregivers, segueing from the lyrical to the offensive, from erotica to scenes of humor, from the logical to the bizarre, all the while weaving in and out of the minds of characters any of whom might be the author of the novel or simply one of the characters inside the hallucinations of the author. In other words, the novel attempts to capture the twists and turns and mangled logic inside a world being formed and distorted by Alzheimer’s neurofibrillary tangles and neuritic plaques.
The novel also seems to be about the nature of existence and delusion and states of consciousness, and suggests that non-sequential distorted versions of reality are all that we may be experiencing, indeed, all that we may be able to experience; but, particularly in light of this writer’s previous work readers should bear in mind that the novel may in fact be nothing more than a sex-crazed writer’s overpowering need to write erotica.
Be that as it may, it should be understood by one and all that these characters are not bad people; nor did they ever set out to do bad things. Of course, by the end of the novel, there may be those who disagree.
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“There is a perverse streak in all of us, an urgency to experience the unusual.”
- John D. MacDonald, The Long Lavender Look
“All human emotions are degrading except lust.”
- Anonymous
“Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction.”
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
“A stiff prick has no conscience.”
- Anonymous
“What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
“The information highway runs through a Thai pussy.”
- Anonymous
“An author is forever consulting his mind, even as the hand will query the penis.”
- Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing
“What is a novelist but a general who sends his troops across fields of paper?”
- Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on
Writing
“It’s all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you’re not getting any.”
- Charles Bukowski, interview by Sean Penn
“Reality is a shared hallucination.”
- Harold Bloom
“After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin’ but a collective hunch.”
- Lily Tomlin
“The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful.” – The Immoralist, Andre Gide
“God did punish him and deliver him into a woman’s hands.” – Judith 16:7
“But more than one man today, I fear, would venture to recognize himself in this narrative.” - The Immoralist, Andre Gide
“Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire
I have no precious time at all to spend
Nor services to do till you require.”
- William Shakespeare
“And who’s to say how many passions and how many warring thoughts can cohabit in a man?” - The Immoralist, Andre Gide
“Here any exertion is impossible, so closely does pleasure follow desire.” - The Immoralist, Andre Gide
“If sex was knowledge, and I believed it was, I was on the verge of knowing everything.” – My Other Life, Paul Theroux
“Desire for me was always the fulfillment of a fantasy – not a surprise or a shock, but something studied in advance, dreamed and premeditated.” – My Other Life, Paul Theroux
“This was a story without an ending, without even a middle. I felt sure there would be more. There would be consequences.” – My Other Life, Paul Theroux
“I was exhausted, excited, the closeness of the beautiful woman seized hold of me like a fever.” – Venus in Furs, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
“I’m a young, frivolous woman. It’s dangerous for you to submit to me so completely. You’ll actually wind up as my plaything.” – Venus in Furs, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
“Why fret? For when by some wild imp we’re tempted
Another force prevails, and sin’s preempted.”
- The Diary, Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
“When sinful mortals wander far from home,
Beauty’s fine web may catch them as they roam.”
- The Diary, Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
“The eternal feminine/Draws us onward.”
- Faust, Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
“Never underestimate the power of a pussy.”
- Playboy interview, Cheech & Chong
“Anyway, to him there’s no better meshing of social and biological functions than paid sex. It’s always gratifying, leaving him quite pleased with himself and with the world in general. He is amused by men who proudly proclaim that they have never paid for it. This remark, so unnecessarily spoken yet spoken out of great necessity to the speaker, indicates to Ben that these guys are either completely superficial, or strongly homosexual and running scared, or…what? Why must they assert this, and always using the exact same phrase? Unless of course they’re stating that money is more sacred to them than sex, a position which would truly separate a man from his species.”
- John O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas
"Well, yes, yes, I do enjoy being enslaved by you. There is, there really is enjoyment in the utmost degree of humility and insignificance."
- The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Brain injury can lead to a loss of inhibition, and thereby to an extravagant flowering of experience.”
- Consciousness: A User’s Guide, Adam Zeman
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“Sins of the mind are far greater than sins of the flesh.” - Anonymous
“Men are weak. I know that because I’m weak when it comes to women myself….A woman can make you do anything she wants you to do with that there little hair pie they’ve got between their legs. I know it, and you know it, too.”
- Miami Blues, Charles Willeford
“A true friend stabs you in the front.” – Oscar Wilde
“Never did it occur to him that such activity was a way of giving a woman pleasure or of paying adoring homage to the very special sweets of her gender….”
- A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
“‘Women! Women! Women!’ Ma snarled, pounding on the desk. ‘Always the same: Barker, Karpis, Dillinger – they all went the same way – because of women!’”
- No Orchids for Miss Blandish, James Hadley
Chase
“As you may know, in this Town, memory is unreliable and uncertain.” - Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
“Good-bye to the novel, sanity, and good health. Hello angels!” – preface to Crazy Cock, Henry Miller
“The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.” The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
“That’s the trouble, I don’t remember anything like everything, or even enough, so in writing about it I’m at a disadvantage straight away, really, trying to put down what is true.” – Albert Angelo, B. S. Johnson
“All concepts in the mind that we take for reality are to be investigated: Know what concepts do to the mind.” Ajahn Sumedho, Abbot of Amaravati Monastery
“Brain injury can lead to a loss of inhibition, and thereby to an extravagant flowering of experience.”
- Consciousness: A User’s Guide, Adam Zeman
“Reality is a shared hallucination.”
- Harold Bloom
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