by JULIET WATERS

If you’re not in the habit of shredding credit card receipts, Jenefer Shute’s thought-provoking thriller, User I.D., will change that. And while you’re learning everything you need to know about the fast-growing crime of identity theft, if you’re not in the habit of thinking about what constitutes a sense of self in this day and age, this dark, funny pageturner may change that too.

“Vera never felt like herself in L.A.,” the novel opens, though Vera de Sica probably just sees more about herself here than she wants to: that she’s a skittish driver, that she’s been letting herself get a little frumpy of late, that her career as an instructor at a New York community college lacks glamour, and that she’s not as streetwise as she thinks. Within a few pages, she’s handed the keys for her rental car to Howie, a grifter posing as the rental agency’s valet. A nightmare situation, but a minor one it turns out, given that the agency is insured for car theft.

Her painful process of self-awareness, however, has only just begun. Vera left a credit card receipt and an academic conference brochure, at which she was presenting a paper, in the glove compartment. Armed with these two clues, Howie’s girlfriend Charlene, a dissatisfied cosmetics salesgirl, sets about exploiting Vera’s credit rating. Clueless though not stupid, Charlene imagines Vera as a cosmopolitan, highly educated Manhattan apartment owner with an affluent Sex and the City lifestyle. Her mission in the next few weeks is to improve her lot by stealing Vera’s identity and blowing through as much credit as she can in the next couple of weeks, which turns out to be a terrifying amount.

What soon emerges is that these two women have an eerie amount in common. Vera’s got more education, but the dull, low-paying academic position she’s stayed at too long is about to be cut, and she probably gets less work satisfaction from teaching than Charlene does from doing makeovers on department store shoppers. Both women are in emotionally under-nourishing relationships with guys they met online. Vera is at least having good sex with her much younger, computer geek boyfriend, Chris, but the only thing Charlene seems to be getting from the repulsive alcoholic Howie is the thrill of their mutual love of larceny.

Obese, pathetic and desperate, Charlene is not entirely without brains. If she put the same kind of energy into improving her own life as she puts into stealing Vera’s, she might have a shot at some self-esteem. But the more money and symbols of status she acquires, the more conscious she becomes of the disparity between her real self and her imagined self, and the more she takes it out on Vera.

By the time Vera has discovered she’s tens of thousands of dollars in debt, Charlene has hacked into her e-mail account and is sending malicious mail to co-workers, students, family and her therapist. In a savagely comic scene, Vera grapples with how this violation has left her feeling. Battling her shrink’s attempts to supply her with readymade self-awareness (“so basically it’s this sense that you might never feel safe again in the way you did before?”) Vera comes to a realization more often voiced in fiction than therapy. All her life she’s felt like an impostor becoming only the self foisted on her by circumstance, doing little towards creating a more authentic sense of identity. “Can you steal something,” Vera wondered, “that—in her case—didn’t really exist? An impostor posing as an impostor: it made no sense, it made her head swim.”

The extensive research Shute has put into this novel shows, and will do much to arm anyone who reads it. But more interesting really, and more meaningful perhaps, is the work Shute has put into showing how contemporary culture sometimes does a far more insidious job of destroying people’s sense of self than any two-bit grifter could ever do.

User I.D. by Jenefer Shute, Houghton Mifflin, hc, 258pp, $32.95