In ["Acts of Theft"], Arthur A. Cohen assigns himself the formidable task of making us believe in an art—sculpture—that we can't see, of evoking space shaped in silence, "essential things," by a piling on of words. That he succeeds should come as no surprise. Mr. Cohen is always ambitious, and almost always succeeds. In his tour de force, "A Hero in His Time," he made us believe in a Russian-Jewish minor poet with whose soul Mr. Cohen had no right to be so well acquainted. In his astonishing "In the Days of Simon Stern," he made me believe that all of us are Jewish.

Stefan Mauger is Austrian, born with our century, of minor nobility, a young Count whose father goes mad. Educated in and around Vienna, he leaves for Paris to teach himself to paint. He is befriended by the American art critic Clemens Rosenthal—a nice touch, that name—who tells him frankly that, on canvas, Mauger has failed. Mauger knows it. He turns to sculpture and to mythology, to the fixities of ancient Egypt and to the carvings of folk craftsmen. He worships Brancusi, even as he resists Brancusi's influence in favor of his example. He makes masks….

After yet another war, Mauger follows Clemens Rosenthal to New York, marries his mistress and takes off for the Pacific Northwest, where the shamanistic art of the Kwakiutl Indians, "indifferent to measurable time," enrages him: he's not as good as they are. Mauger and his wife, Alicia, escape to Mexico, to Yucatan, where we first meet them. Brancusi has died. Rosenthal, who is about to die, brings the news. Mauger, at work on his "creatures," his bestiary, is confronted by the death of Brancusi, the dying of his friend, and, at the same time, Inspector Mariposa of the Mexico Police.

Mauger, you see, is a thief, specializing in pre-Columbian art. He has organized a major heist from an archeological site. For Inspector Mariposa, who was once a student of archeology, the stolen art … is his identity…. Mauger, on the other hand, despises the "brutalism" of this art….

In the confrontation of Mauger and Mariposa, the many themes of "Acts of Theft" scream together, a distraught chorus—the artist as God, art as theft, the ransom of the past, the ancient made modern, pride and sacrifice. I think it was Rimbaud who said that the poet is a thief of fire. For Mauger, his stealing and his art are "interlocking acts of seizure." We are violated by the gods. We have to make silence out of the noise. It is an idea that might have been found in the notebooks of Dostoyevsky….

We also have some ups and downs. Among the ups: a young Mauger stealing the medical report on his mad father, as if to remind us that knowledge is a kind of theft; the sudden friendship of Mauger and Rosenthal; the first, wonderful, silent meeting between Mauger and Brancusi; the account of the Kwakiutl Indians, their art and their potlatch; a Mexico brilliantly rendered without the heavy breathing of D. H. Lawrence in "The Plumed Serpent." Among the downs: an altogether too casual attitude toward crucial scenes in the novel. Why should Mauger marry Alicia? Rosenthal in Mexico is too convenient and too omniscient. Mariposa and Mauger ought to have had a longer confrontation; they understand each other too quickly; Dostoyevsky would have given them a hundred pages. And Mariposa needs more development to be a worthy adversary.

This, however, is housecleaning and bookkeeping. We believe in Mauger's rage and in his bestiary, that garden of the hieratic crane, the ovum, the eye, the bear, the stone masks and the women and the phalluses. We believe Mauger himself in his solitude, as he tries and fails to burn his way to the truths of wood and stone. He lacks an acceptable metaphysics of the unseen, but if he can smash the Olmec figurine and then allow his own sculptured eye to be destroyed, he may be on his way. Prometheus may steal his genius. We believe because Mr. Cohen has somehow found words that amount to a revelation instead of an excuse.