ADVERTISER BOOK CLUB
Magician rose from flickers of childhood

Excerpt

"With age, the world falls into two camps: those who have seen much of the world and those who have seen too much. Charles Carter was a young man, just 35, but at some point after his wife's death, he had seen too much. Every six months or so he tried to retire, a futile gesture as he knew nothing except how to be a magician. But a magician who has lost the spark of life is not a careful magician, and is not a magician for long. Ledocq (Carter's props man) had chastised him so often Carter could do the lectures himself, including directions in French and Yiddish. 'Make a commitment, Charlie. Go with life or go with death, but quit the kvetching. Don't keep us in suspense.' ... Six nights a week, sometimes twice a night, Carter gave the illusion of cheating death. The great irony, in his eyes, was that he did not wish to cheat it."

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Making your mark A new offer: Everyone who participates by sending in comments, questions or discussion points will receive a free commemorative Advertiser Book Club bookmark. Just include your name and mailing address when you respond.

There in the flickering light of Laurel and Hardy's schtick and Charlie Chaplin's little tramp was born a fascination with the 1920s that would eventually furnish the setting for Gold's best-selling "Carter Beats the Devil" (Hyperion, paper, $14.95).

It is characteristic of Gold's world view and of his writing that dry humor cushions the somewhat dark reasons for this fascination: "I was convinced that this was what adults did in the middle of the night; important stuff that they couldn't share with kids. So I felt that by learning all about this stuff I was gonna get a head start on adulthood, which I desperately wanted to do because I hated being a kid," he says.

Marvel at it

Gold, 39, grew up in California, his head stuck in comic books. He wrote his first piece when he was about 9 or 10 and sent it off to Marvel Comics, confident it would be published. The editor returned a kind critique and Gold kept writing while he attended Wesleyan University and the University of California-Berkeley, penning four novels that he says are still in a bottom drawer somewhere and will stay there "because they're bad."

He wrote personal essays for newspapers and magazines, summarized depositions for lawyers ("until I was replaced by software"), served as "the receptionist you really didn't want to talk to," edited grant proposals and tried to make a novel work.

During this period, when Gold was living in an apartment in a sort of 1920s castle in Oakland, Calif., all hidden staircases and over-the-top rococo decor, his father played a key role again, presenting him with a 1926 poster for a magic show put on by the real Carter the Great. You can see the poster, manipulated a bit, on the cover of his book.

"Carter Beats the Devil" is the result of a question Gold posed himself: "What would a guy be like who had a poster like this as a calling card?"

He wanted to write a novel unlike most other literary works about magicians, one that was focused more on the man than the magic — and that placed sleight of hand in its proper perspective.

"OK, I roll out of bed, have a cup of coffee, and I try to figure out a new way to saw someone in half," Gold mused. "What kind of person does that? I hadn't seen an answer, so I got more and more interested in trying to portray it."

Gold had a great deal of fun with the whiz-bang action, conjuring up evil pirates, revenge plots, horrible devices, explosions and attempted murders. But, he said, "where lots of action films and action novels fall down for me is the characters are really cardboard."

His off-stage Carter is the real man of mystery: a man who who endows a home for retired show animals and staffs it with out-of-work vaudevillians, who chooses not to go upstairs with a tempting pair of prostitutes because he sees that they are as much in the business of acting as he is, and who endures unspeakable guilt and grief in a dignified and private way.

"The reason it was fun to write about him is that he is essentially decent and honorable," said Gold. "He has a bit of nobility about him without being boring."

A ladies' man

On the other pole, Gold said, "I felt the book would live and die by how well I did the women."

In the 1920s, he said, women were breaking out of their corsets, literally and figuratively, which offered him the opportunity to imagine some very interesting love interests for Carter.

As often happens, the hero of Gold's book bears some surface resemblance to the author.

That is, when we meet Carter the Great we may find the magician a little bit too mouthy, a guy who appears to value cleverness over kindness, whose facade disguises a world-weary soul. (We learn better later.)

As Gold describes it, that was the kind of writer he was until, in his early 30s, he entered a writers' workshop at the University of California-Irvine and learned that cleverness isn't genius and that everybody could do with some editing. He ate a little humble pie, in other words, but it was served alongside a good dash of creative support from the dozen others in his famously successful workshop class. (Among his classmates: Alice Sebold, now his wife. Sebold is author of the mega-bestselling "The Lovely Bones," long-listed for Britain's prestigious Orange Prize.)

"I learned to internalize the voices of a few good critics and to use criticism to make my work better, to understand what was appropriate to take and what to cast off," he recalls.

Gold grew into a writer who could imagine a man who, while still world-weary, is also a person of fundamental optimism.

Keeping the faith

If there is a central question to be answered by this book, he says, it is this: "How do you go on knowing all that you know? How do you keep faith if you are aware of how terrible everything can be?"

It is a daily question for Gold himself, despite critical praise of his book, his happy marriage and the fact that he'll never have to labor as a disgruntled office worker again.

"It's a serious question when I get up in the morning, 'Why bother?' Because when I wrote the book the world was a terrible place. It's a terrible enough place now and it was awful in the 1920s. But it all depends on how you look at it. It's also a completely wonderful place.

"It really is a matter of choice; whether you notice the fireworks or the dull thump with which they are launched is up to you. And you can also notice them both — and that's what I really felt when I concluded the book. I felt I had kind of made that case."

Join the club

Here's how to get involved in the Honolulu Advertiser Book Club:

Membership: You become a member by reading the book and sending in your comments and questions to participate in the virtual discussion.

Book club visits: Books editor Wanda Adams seeks groups that are reading along with the Advertiser Book Club, or are willing to do so for a future selection, so she can drop in on a discussion meeting. Call her at 525-8036.

Our book: "Carter Beats The Devil," by Glen David Gold. Hyperion, paper, $14.95 (but widely discounted online).

Reading period: Until May 9.

Next "discussion": May 18.

To participate in the discussion: Read the book, send comments and questions to Wanda Adams, The Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Fax: 525-8055.

E-mail: bookclub@honoluluadvertiser.com.

Include your name and address if you want a commemorative bookmark.

Listen: To the "Sandwich Islands Literary Circle" at 9:30 tonight, KHPR 88.1 FM, KKUA 90.7 FM Maui, KANO 91.1 FM Hilo; or hear the program online, starting tomorrow at the.honoluluadvertiser.com/current/il/bookclub.