Carter Beats The Devil: On writing magic
Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats The Devil, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST.
Donna Bowman: Almost all live performance frightens me. But magic frightens me the most. The combination of unpredictability and danger creates suspense that I find almost unbearable. Of course everything is supposed to be tightly controlled, but that just makes it worse; if something truly does go wrong, the shock is doubled, and the longed-for release never comes. In Carter Beats The Devil, several sequences had me racing through the paragraphs, skimming pages, just to get to the point where I could find out whether Carter was one step ahead of his enemies and the audience, engineering the effect, or whether the act had gone off the rails.
Of course, that really means I was concerned about what tricks author Glen David Gold had up his sleeve for me. More than any other novel featuring magic that I've read, this one made me aware of the magician as theatrical deity, the author as magician—employing misdirection, stagecraft, drama, technology, and prestidigitation. And therefore of the author as literary deity, controlling his created world, seeming to be at the mercy of other forces but perhaps being in control all along—or perhaps not. Did you experience this book as magic, with all that attendant danger and unpredictability? Or is that suspense as much of an illusion as the Houdini escape that had Carter squirming?
Rowan Kaiser: Reading Carter Beats The Devil reminded me of the film The Prestige, which came out a few years later (although the book came out a few years earlier). Both stories use the process of magic as both the subject of their work and the structure of their plot. The Prestige does so explicitly, with narration at the beginning and end of the film, but Carter Beats The Devil might do it better. The first, and arguably best, trick that it pulls off is early in the novel, when Carter gets a crush on Sarah, whom he assumes he is supposed to wed, before the “real” Sarah is revealed. It's a clever bit of misdirection, keeping the audience so intently focused on the first Sarah that we don’t realize that hey, people use stage names!
The entirety of the novel contains similar formal magic. We start with a single, important mystery: the death of President Harding. As it progresses, we see several mysteries piled atop one another: television, Carter’s finances, Carter’s love life, the Secret Service, Borax Smith, Mysterioso. A drawing of the amount of mystery contained in the text from start to finish would probably look just like a bell curve. These questions tend to get resolved in the reverse order from which they appeared—Harding first and last, Mysterioso second and second-to-last, etc. It’s not just unresolved questions, either, it’s also thematic and character stuff. We’re introduced to the Kowalskis early on, and they look like nothing more than an object lesson for young Carter. But at the end of the book, they’re not only brought into the story, it’s done in such a way that their tiny tale gets a nice little bow on top.
A great deal of fiction has the problem of being contrived in order to reach its resolution; it’s rare that a story manages to satisfy both narrative requirements and a sense of realism. (This is part of the reason I tend to lean more toward non-fiction). It’s a neat trick, or rather, a special illusion, when an author gets it right, I think, which is part of why I believe that Carter Beats The Devil makes a remarkably compelling case for storyteller-as-magician.
Zack Handlen: I love magic, and I love stories about magic. I remember being so prepared to love The Prestige that I spent the first 20 minutes unable to actually really engage with it, and I had something of the same problem with Carter. A magician who may have been involved with the death of a president? Who has an act with the devil in it? (I’m also a sucker for occult intimations.) I wasn’t exactly giddy, but it all seemed so perfect that I kept tripping over what wasn’t perfect. The prose was more functional than thrilling, and the prologue, while conceptually fascinating, didn’t catch the way I wanted it to. It took me a while to get invested in the story, and that’s probably because, given how ready I was to enjoy it, my expectations became too high—I kept imagining the book it was going to be, instead of appreciating the book it was.
But isn’t that always the problem with magic tricks? There’s a great scene three-quarters of the way through the novel where Carter tells Borax Smith (one of many characters here who felt like more potential than delivery) how to make an elephant disappear. You know how the scene will play out: Borax keeps asking for the truth, Carter keeps telling him he’ll be disappointed when he hears it; then Carter finally shares the secret, and Borax is, of course, disappointed. As are we. Even though we know the elephant couldn’t really disappear, when we ask for the secret, we want to be told “Yes, it’s all real, you were never fooled.” And then once we realize how simple the truth is, we resent the fictionalist for showing us how easily we’re fooled.
Like Donna and Rowan said, the wonderful thing about Carter is that it is full of magical tricks, with misdirections great and small. This is actually one of the fundamental principles of genre storytelling—one of the reasons people were so frustrated with the end of Lost was that so much of the show was about distraction, and distraction has a way of building up expectations. That build-up creates terrific momentum, and makes for compulsive reading (or watching), but unlike with a real magic act, eventually, you have to show the strings. I enjoyed much of Carter (I'm probably going to sound pretty down on it over the course of this week, but I want to get that in at the beginning; this was one of the most purely enjoyable books we read for WUiB, at least for me), but when it came time to start delivering on its promises, to start including on the trick of where all those disappearing elephants went, it turned out to be just as mundane as a platform with a fake wall. Glen David Gold was much better at the Pledge and the Anticipation than he was at the Prestige—but let’s be honest here. Most writers are, and that was one hell of a setup while it lasted.