Fiction Mondays: Carter Beats the Devil

Despite being a little busy with moving, I found time in the past few weeks to read, from start to finish, Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, a book that has been on my radar for several years.  It's one of those books that I would look at every time I was in the bookstore, read the back cover of, and tell myself I had to read it eventually.  Finally, I decided it was going on my summer reading list, and I am so glad I made that decision.

The book is pretty big, somewhere around 650 pages, all of them bursting.  There are reprints of posters from magic's heyday around the turn of the century, and a playbill in the beginning of the book that turns out to be something of a table of contents.  The story revolves around Charles Carter, a real-life illusionist who was a contemporary of Houdini and Thurston, diving back into his life story and the events surrounding the death of President Harding in 1923.  As he begins his career, Carter meets the Marx Brothers (back when they were still Julius, Adolph, and Leonard on the vaudeville stage), as well as "Borax" Smith, a real-life business magnate; he makes a nemesis, Mysterioso, and is promoted by Houdini, leading him to worldwide fame and success.

Much of the book revolves around the aftermath of President Harding's death, with a large section delving into the hapless Secret Service agent who is investigating Charles Carter.  The agent, Jack Griffin, is desperately trying to regain his reputation after failing to prevent the assassination of McKinley.  While Griffin is kind of a moron, he does manage to make one great discovery, and toward the end of the novel, Carter calls him "the greatest audience member I ever had."  I don't want to spoil anything, because there are so many great twists and turns, but the last third of the book is extremely exciting, and revolves around a technology invented by a young man named Philo Farnsworth.

I really loved this book, and it made me think of two others: Water for Elephants and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  I love when a work of fiction creates a world that's so large and encompassing that it surpasses the idea of historical fiction--I don't know what you'd call it, really, but some books just have this way of pulling in people and events from history and making you believe they really interacted with these fictional characters.  It almost seems more real than history, in its way.  Whether it's Kavalier and Clay at a party with Salvador Dali or Carter the Great receiving a motorcycle from BMW's co-founder Max Friz, I really enjoy when a story jumps off of the page and wanders into the real world.  What is interesting about this book's connection to Kavalier and Clay is that the two novels were published around the same time, are both enormous, and were both written by authors who graduated from the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine.  Must have been something in the water.

I could not stop reading this book once I picked it up.  It has mystery, suspense, and perhaps most importantly, wonder.  That's kind of the theme of the novel, I guess, this idea of a loss of wonder and how it is regained.  For a long time in the middle, Carter is depressed and detached, so much so that he often feels he is looking down on his life happening.  What saves him is his ability surprise and to be surprised, his ability to elicit wonder.  I think this makes him a really admirable character, and is a characteristic that comes through in the writing: through the book, there are some incredible feats of misdirection and surprise, the work of a writer who is something of a magician himself.