May 24, 2004
Jillette (the speaking half of the renowned Penn & Teller magician/comedy team) opts to narrate his eccentric debut thriller from the perspective of the protagonist's sock monkey, Dickie, who constantly refers to his owner—a member of the New York City police scuba diving unit—as the Little Fool. Little Fool hauls up a woman's corpse one day during a dive; on land, he recognizes her as Nell, a stripper he once dated. She is, it seems, the most recent victim of a serial killer. Little Fool tells Nell's best friend, a rampantly gay hairdresser named Tommy; they form a platonic bond as they search the city for the murderer, whose name is Smitty and who fancies himself a writer. Toward the end of the book, Little Fool himself unexpectedly takes over the narrative duties from Dickie in order to do a fast wrapup. Jillette's voice, as expressed through the persona of a stuffed puppet, is by turn folk philosophical, ranting, rageful, insightful and—often—annoying. As narrator, the monkey cannot help overshadowing the novel's other characters, and the plot is more perfunctory than inspired. A lot more dialogue and a lot less monkey would have strengthened the book considerably; as it is, it fails to work either as a literary experiment or as a straight thriller. Agent, Dan Strone.
July 1, 2004
Take one serial killer who is looking for God in all the wrong places and one slightly demented sock monkey narrator. Mix with two heroes: one an NYPD diver; the other, a gay hairdresser. Stir in hundreds of pop culture references and a heaping cup of scatological sex. The result is the first novel from the talking half of the magician duo Penn and Teller. Fun and funny hip, it is a stream-of-consciousness meditation on life, death, love, sex, friendship, and the dangers of loneliness. Jillette's libertarian, antireligious bias will likely offend conservative readers as the shtick in his magic act does the prudish. Fans of the duo and their warped sense of humor will line up to read the book. For public libraries.-Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from May 1, 2004
Jillette's the big, goggled guy with the wavy Steven Seagal do, who yaks a mile a minute while his ever-silent partner, Teller, performs illusions that make Houdini look like a duffer. He writes the way he talks, in a sort of blizzard of smart-alecky, philosophical wit, but adds a pop-song allusion to nearly every paragraph; perhaps the only thing like his style is Stephen King streaming the consciousness of one of his crazed, possessed lowlifes. Jillette's narrator in his first novel is something King could have created: a sock monkey named Dickie, the childhood doll of a now six-foot-six diver for the NYPD, who fishes stiffs out of the drink, and whom Dickie calls the Little Fool. When he dredges up the overstabbed corpse of the woman he loved, Nell, a stripper-lapdancer with an intellectual streak and bed skills for days, he determines to find her killer, who in short order reprises his act with four more women and two men. The Little Fool enlists Tommy, his and Nell's homosexual mutual friend, and the two launch an investigation, strictly illegal (the Little Fool's a diver-cop, not a detective), that culminates in a nail-biting, comical, gory, bittersweet showdown. The denouement, in which Dickie yields the floor and a moral is drawn (viz., Don't have faith! [Jillette's a nonbeliever, big-time]), rather stomps things flat, but until then, " Sock" is socko!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)