Pay no attention to the poet behind that mask

But before she can send Chubb packing, she reads the grimy page of verse he offers. "I approached these 20 lines with both suspicion and hostility," she admits, but "my heart was beating very fast indeed. Rereading the fragment, I felt that excitement in my blood which is the only thing an editor should ever trust." She's hooked, despite herself.

Determined to see more of the McCorkle manuscript, she promises to write a profile about Chubb, while he bribes her into listening to his life story by promising more poems. "I loathe dishonesty," he begins dishonestly, claiming he invented that notorious prank only to teach a snobby young editor a lesson: that he was too infatuated with shallow literary trends, that he couldn't spot the truth of great literature.

"If what I did sounds cruel it will only be to people with no appreciation of art," Chubb insists. But the editor's death was only the first of many unintended tragedies. At the absurd obscenity trial that followed publication of the fraudulent poems, a madman named Bob McCorkle rose up from the gallery and denounced the prosecution.

From that moment, Chubb's life became a deadly struggle with this monster he brought forth. "How do I know from where?" Chubb sighs. "From hell, I suppose. I imagined someone and he came into being." Once the humiliated editor was dead, McCorkle hounded Chubb, reciting "his" poetry, demanding a birth certificate, and insisting on a childhood to fill out his existence. When Chubb couldn't comply, McCorkle kidnapped his baby and fled into the jungle of Indonesia, setting in motion a 15-year chase, a deadly cycle of revenge, and a volley of allusions to Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Franz Kafka.

Of course, Sarah sees this ancient mariner's tale as a pathetic fiction of self-justification, but it's so captivating - to her and us. And the physical fact of McCorkle's breathtaking poetry along with other details that Carey wickedly taunts us with make it impossible to determine where Chubb's testimony crosses into psychosis. The difficulty of untangling this web of mysteries is compounded when Sarah finally talks with Slater about her mother's suicide and realizes that she's fictionalized significant portions of her own past as well.

In typical Carey style, all this races along in a dazzling narrative that binds us to Sarah's plight, swinging between certainty and doubt, tearing through the tissue that separates what we know from what is true. One can't help running through this labyrinth of deceit in a kind of panic, searching for the end, hoping it won't come.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments toRon Charles.

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