August 1, 2004

Something Up My Sleeve

N 1985, Penn Jillette and I opened our show ''Penn & Teller'' off Broadway. At the opening-night party, our producer read one review aloud. It was a rave, a career maker. The guests burst into applause. But Penn and I were appalled. What the reviewer had described was nothing like the show Penn and I thought we were doing.

Later we talked. ''A reviewer,'' Penn said, ''is always on a first date. He's not actually watching the show; he's thinking about what he's going to say to his date afterwards.'' So I wrote a grateful letter to the generous critic, and Penn and I made a solemn vow never again to read our own reviews.

It's nearly two decades later, and I find myself trying to write about Penn's novel, SOCK (St. Martin's Griffin, paper, $12.95). I have sympathy for that old theater critic now. As I sat and read ''Sock,'' every time I laughed or felt my pulse pounding, every time I was struck by an insight or charmed by a piquant phrase, I suddenly began hearing in my head what I'd say afterward to you, the reader -- my date. To any thinking person, this undermines my credibility.

There's another reason not to trust me: I'm biased. But do you really want an unbiased review? An impersonal report that weighs a work of art on antiseptic scales in units of cosmic goodness? Of course not. That's no fun. You want to learn the bias of a hotheaded reviewer and read him in that light. Since I've chosen Penn as my lifelong artistic partner, my prejudices should be obvious. I can't react impartially to Penn's newborn baby. I see in its fierce little eyes all the traits I know in its father.

''Sock'' is an explosion. It bursts out and races across the pages. ''Sock'' is funny, all the time; even the sad stuff is funny (shivery more often than har-har, but still very funny). ''Sock'' declares itself a noir detective novel, and gets gut-wrenchingly suspenseful at times with twists and blood and night and gunshots. But don't take its declarations too literally. As an old friend used to say: ''Penn lies. He thinks it's funny.''

The narrator is Dickie, a sock monkey. Dickie is a tough little bundle of loving id who tells it like it is. He talks like a beatnik on a barstool at the microphone at a coffeehouse. ''My button eyes are like a shark's eyes. Buttons from a sharkskin suit. My eyes have been fiddled with by a hustler. Nervously tapped by a bad man. My eyes are worn right in the center from the tapping of a diamond pinkie ring. It was his gambler's tell.'' Dickie's riffs are Bob Dylan possessed by Ayn Rand, laced with quoted song lyrics and classic film dialogue -- sly little Easter eggs for the reader to uncover.

Dickie has grown up with a boy who has grown up to be the Little Fool, a man who looks and talks a lot like the real-world Penn Jillette, except that the Little Fool is a not a Las Vegas showman but a New York police diver who has found a former girlfriend's bloated corpse and now is on an intellectual vigilante hunt with his hairdresser and best friend, Tommy, a handsome, gutsy Greenwich Village queen. Their quest is full of literary names and theological clues that make the Little Fool feel ''the way he'd felt doing jigsaw puzzles with his mom. It's the existentialist's dream: a jigsaw puzzle that matters.''

How much do we care about finding the killer? Do we care about the demon whale in ''Moby-Dick''? Sure, but the hunt is mostly an excuse to go sit in a smoky diner booth at 4 a.m. and listen to Melville -- sorry, I mean Penn -- sorry, I mean Dickie the sock monkey -- singing wild, heartfelt songs about the world. ''I'm a bad wammerjammer sock monkey, so I can say what you can't,'' says Dickie. And that's no idle boast.

Dickie has hung for years on the Little Fool's bedpost and has kept his shiny sharkskin-suit button eyes wide open. ''Women,'' he muses, ''always know if they want to have sex with a guy the instant they meet him. The Little Fool had done a lot of debriefing on this subject. The Little Fool loves sex, but he likes the debriefing more. I have nothing to do with the sex, but I'm always there for the debriefing. After sex, before getting dressed, there's a chance to get information. 'What did you think when you first saw me?' The information is always the same. Your partners always decide in the first five minutes. After that, the only change can be in the negative direction. After you win, you can only lose. Married. Killer. Kenny G. Smells bad. Kisses badly. Democrat. Bye, bye love.''

Dickie talks a lot, and very knowledgeably, about sex -- all kinds, not just breeder stuff. But he has higher ambitions. ''I'm trying,'' he says, ''to tell you how the Little Fool sees the world. I'm trying to write about what's in his heart. Sometimes I want you to say, 'Yeah, I know how he feels,' and sometimes you have to say, 'What a nut.' Another human being -- compare and contrast.'' So at every turn of the story, Dickie pauses to smell the roses -- or the sewage -- and tell us what he thinks.

Parenting? ''Unconditional love from both Mommy and Daddy, that'll make you tough. That'll make you 12 feet tall and bulletproof. That's what that'll do. It'll make a little fool spit nails.'' Bereavement? ''They should rent kids out for funerals. But not well-behaved kids being solemn. They should rent out hellions. It's one of those times when you need a really bad kid.'' Listening to Dickie at his jazziest makes you want to talk like him, the way watching the Marx Brothers makes you want to strip off your clothes in the elevator and run into the party naked.

Naturally, the Easter eggs hidden in this book are different for me than they'd be for you. In ''Sock'' I hear Penn's dead parents alive again in his New England turns of phrase, his no-nonsense atheism and his love of pot roast and covered-dish suppers with Jell-O salad topped with ''the stuff that makes it good.'' Penn is mostly self-educated, and ''Sock'' is filled with the ideas of the friends who have been his teachers: scientists, inventors, politicos, carnies, comics, jugglers, gamblers, musicians and a certain crippled sage with whom the teen-age Penn apprenticed on an ice cream truck. I even see bits of my own life's flesh scattered here and there in ''Sock,'' and I must admit I'm unnerved -- and flattered.

What I've written here for you, my dear date, is nothing like the book. My words are preseduction prose, chitchat over hors d'oeuvres, while ''Sock'' is a fiery, funny, beating heart, bleeding and grinning on the page. So, if you want ''Sock'' for yourself, you must sit down and read it. Alas, even in reading for pleasure, there's no free lunch.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure: six times a week onstage in Las Vegas, Penn fires a .357 Magnum revolver at my face. It's a trick. I end up alive and healthy with the bullet neatly caught between my teeth. I survive, in large part, because Penn always does his part of the trick correctly. I assure you, however, this would never skew my view of Penn's literary achievement.