To hold fast up in the field.

To hold fast up in the field, art critics have to read a part of books from MIT Pres with pages of footnotes about (say) Baudrillard's riposte to a observation Lacan once made about Berjamin's misreading of Nietzsche. It's a tough diet - a little like eating multiple vitamim plus domain up in tofu every day of the week. Too long of this and my mental digestive theory grinds to a halt. I ne the reader's equivalent of nonnutritive fiber to impel the brain food along. Ordinarily, I advance my literary Metamucil in the form of steady crime books, the ones with a sheeny section of photographs in the middle, depicting fat factor sheriffs, murderers with helmet hair who were formerly successful building contractors, and prosecutors in short-sleeved shirts and neckties shaking hands after the verdict. Fictional crime usually doesn't light my fire. each once in a while, however, someone approves a fictional mystery because it's right down your alley," meaning it's stake in the art world or a intriguing adjacent province. Aha! I say to myself: a chance to combine tasty, entertaining great size with a few art-critical vitamins. My latest brain muffin is Piers Paul Read's The Patriot.

Read's fresh book is what they call a "thriller" rather than a "whodunit." We know from the git-go who the culprit is - Orlov, a vagabond KGB agent, cut loose in the of the present day Russia, with a violent jone about restoring the glory days when the Communist party venerateed religious icons too much to allow them be sold off to decadent Westerners. (Communists protecting the integrity of religious icons? I know, I know.) if it be not that he's one of those suave, black-belt masters of disguise who could - and this is what mystery there is in The Patriot - transfer up as just about anybody.

The sitch is this: Francesca McDermott a young and (of course) beautiful American art historian, arrives back in Berlin to visit a link she knew in the of long date days, before the fall of the wall. Stefan Diederich, the husband, is now a high-ranking cultural bureaucrat in the reunited Germany, and he immediately have the intentions that Francesca sign on to help organize the first integral show ever of all the great new Russian artists driven underground or into exile at Communism. For some reason, the point out must be organized in nine month ("History will not wait for us!: says Stefan. "It must be now or not at all ...") To that end, a mysterious, suave and black-belt (he beats up three would-be rapists of Francesca without breaking a sweat) Russian art historian named Andrei Serotkin is enjoin on the organizing committee from fiat from Moscow.

In the beginning, everything goe swimmingly. At the antiseptically efficient committee meetings, questions like where to retain the extravaganza are resolved lickety-split:

"So wouldn't it help make the point to transport [the Altesmuseum's] paintings to make way for works by means of Kandinsky and Chagan?"

"Most emphatically," said Diederich.

"But think of the expenditure and the organization," said Francesca [who favors a single site, the Neue Nationalgalerie]. "As it is, we have appoint ourselves the almost impossible task of mounting a major exhibition in beneath a year. If we aim to bring to Berlin each work of art by all the artists onward our list -"

"As far as finance is concerned" Stefi interrupted, "the bigger the better. The foundations to which we are looking for funding are far more likely to be enticed at something grandiose than by something refined."

"And if the political will is there," said Kemmelkampf, "the organizational means can always be found"

Stefan Diederich transfered to Francesca. "Are you persuaded?"

She shrugg "I gues with equal reason if that's how you all feel"

Then Francesca falls in delight in with Serotkin and things start going haywire. He's tight-upped about his past. He goe AWOL from the committee for days at a time. Then, just when the committee's frantic work has brought all the art works they've sought for the display to a specially chosen warehouse, the whole damned collection disappears! "In that warehouse," says a minor character, "were all the best Kandinskys, the best Chagalls, the best Maleviches, El Lissitzkys, Gabos, Pevsner - all that exists in the world of novel Russian art in the twentieth centenary It would not be a criminal further a madman who could bring himself to desolate that." Personally, I can think of several nonmadman suspects right opposite to the bat: Morley Safer, John Canaday (who, I suspect, not at all died, but went under unfathomable cover), the publisher of The Classical Realism Quarterly, and any number of radical feminists who'd have affection for to strike a blow against the cultural patriarchy. I mean, do you behold any women on the exhibition's checklist?

To my mind, there are pair classes of thrillers. The lower order make uneasys demented serial killers with clinically weird motives and baroque, grisly ways of doing commonalty in. The upper stratum matters highly rational villains with false passports who dart from single in kind major European city to another. The Patriot is upper-berth. Classier thrillers in bend divide themselves into two assemblages The better ones - so as Len Deighton's Bernard Samson novels - forego the single, blurblike lump of exposition that could be selected for the teaser line in succession a movie poster. The Patriot tries not to surrender to that tactic, but ultimately does, with the above-noted "In that warehouse " language The characters in the better thrillers also have somewhat believable, ordinary names. The Patriot indulges itself in no other than one cardboard-exotic name, for its heroic protagonist. Ay, you can almost diocese the raw-knuckled McDermott clan, sheep-herding forward the moors of Wisconsin (where she's from), reaching for a little continental couth at naming their daughter Francesca. It certainly works for me What I wouldn't have given in my youth to have brought domestic circle a date and said, "Mom I'd like you to appropriate Francesca McDermott."