Sock

Rating:
Summary: A carny beatnik philosopher iconoclast gets on paper
Review: Penn's barking beat sounds loud and clear in the narrative voice of this novel. Dickie the sock puppet shepherds the reader through the murder mystery, speaking as though he's the six-foot-six leather-clad protagonist instead of his owner and companion, a police diver known only to us as the "Little Fool." Penn's relentless, take-no-prisoners style comes complete with pop culture quotes (mostly song lyrics) at the end of nearly every paragraph, the curlicue to each riff. It feels as if this story has come from Penn on stage, somehow made it to paper without anything getting lost in the translation, and could easily go right back up on stage again.

The ending is pretty predictable to those who are at all familiar with Penn's take on spirituality, but its saving grace is the style of its antiheroes. The climax is confused, bungled, as real life often is. (...)we're wrong, we're only human, and yet somehow things come out (mostly) all right. This is the optimistic message buried underneath layers of gritty sex, hardcore philosophy, and tough-guy sentiment.

That a sock monkey can so thoroughly slap you up both sides of the head, and leave you thinking, is reason enough to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Sock indeed!
Review: There's something positive to be said for browsing - publishers know this and most authors should as well - random wanderings in bookstores tend to sell a lot of books that otherwise might not get picked up.

As a publisher (nightwares Books, books.nightwares.com) I've become more and more aware of the superiority of bookstores over online selling for this purpose. We hear often of people "surfing" online but that's true only to an extent. Most people who go online are in a directed search. They aren't browsing in the way a wanderer among physical shops is browsing.

Browsing was what brought me to _Sock_, the first major fiction work by Penn Jillette, and I'm glad it did.

Some of you might find his name vaguely familiar; but others are saying, "The Penn Jillette? That Penn Jillette?" It was that name recognition that led me to take the book off the shelf.

Yes, that Penn Jillette, the professional magician, half of the act known as Penn and Teller. The loquacious half. The larger, more intimidating half. And, apparently, the novelist half.

_Sock_ is bizarre and therefore lovely. The story is told from the perspective of Dickie, who is - really - a stuffed sock-monkey owned by the protagonist, whose name is kept hidden from us through most of the novel; he's simply known as the Little Fool.

The Little Fool is a diver for the New York Police Department. It's his job to swim in waters polluted by sewage and to locate bodies. Suicides, drug overdoses, accidental drownings and murders - he's seen them all, and through Dickie's singular, striking voice we're shown one that really begins to make a difference.

The Little Fool's ex-girlfriend Nell is one of the bodies he finds one day.

There ensues a slow spiral into obsession as the Little Fool tries to track down her murderer. Along the way he encounters his late girlfriend's best friend, a gay male beautician named Tommy who's half-convinced that the Little Fool is a deeply closeted gay man. (He may or may not be - Jillette leaves that quite ambiguous.) The two men spend more time together than not and uncover the means by which Nell's murderer - who is a serial killer - chooses his victims.

And, singlehandedly, they set out to put a stop to it.

Dickie, as a narrator, is immersed in pop culture and nearly every paragraph of the novel has a reference. Some are fairly obvious and a few are rather obscure, and the style is a cross between stream-of-consciousness and nearly clinical detachment. It's impossible to not be taken in by the tale, but throughout is the sense that we, as readers, are not being given the whole story.

We're not, and we find out how and why at the end. (And no, it's not that stupidly obvious literary twist you might be thinking of; and no, it's not that other, second most obvious twist either.)

Jillette as a writer is effective; it's a tribute to his talents that I was able to not impose his timbre and meter over the prose. Jillette's spoken voice is singular and quite recognizable, as is his style of delivery; but nowhere in the book does that verbal style of his surface. Hearing him speak onstage is one experience; reading him is another entirely. There are a couple passages that seem to ring a little hollow when dealing with characters' motivations and fantasies, but these are not so glaring as to ruin the value of the story.

Penn Jillette is also an atheist, and that features significantly in _Sock_. His unabashedly rational and humanist outlook is one of the things that gives _Sock_ its stark power. He's also (to the best of my knowledge) heterosexual, but deals extremely well with gay characters, despite the semi-stereotypical occupation of Tommy.

_Sock_ is a significant first novel and a well-written, engaging piece of whodunit fiction; it's one of those lucky finds that I hope others will make as well.

Rating:
Summary: What A Book ... Until The End!
Review: This is one of the most cleverly written novels that I've read in a long time and I loved the pop culture references throughout, but the ending is like a brick wall: it's very abrupt and it hurts when you run into it. It not only is disappointing, but seemed like an easy, cop-out way to end the book. Regardless, it's definitely worth reading -- just don't say I didn't warn you about the ending!