Penn Jillette writes a novel

I think it’s been reported in other places but whatever the case, magician, actor and all-around smartass Penn Jillette (whom most folks know as the tall & talkative half of Penn and Teller) will be adding “novelist” to his list of all trades with the forthcoming release of his debut novel. Unsurprisingly, the book sounds demented and weird–what else would you expect when it’s narrated by a sock monkey?

Twisting the buddy cop story upside down and inside out, Penn Jillette has created the most distinctive narrator to come along in fiction in many years: a sock monkey called Dickie. The sock monkey belongs to a New York City police diver who discovers the body of an old lover in the murky waters of the Hudson River and sets off with her best friend to find her killer. The story of their quest swerves and veers, takes off into philosophical riffs, occasionally stops to tell a side story, and references a treasure trove of 1970’s and 1980’s pop culture.

Although it brings to my mind a certain defunct dotcom, I’m more enthused because I’ve been a fan of Jillette’s writing since I was a young teen getting used to having a PC around the house, after finally upgrading from the Commodore 64 (still my all-time favorite computer. Ah, nostalgia…) My dad was, and still is, a computer buff, religiously acquiring all sorts of how-to manuals, survival guides, and magazines. One of them, PC COMPUTING, featured a monthly column from Jillette that ran from 1990 to 1994, and for some reason that is still unknown to me, I read them regularly. They were funny, and weird, and very, very smart. Most of the time, the columns had nothing whatsoever to do with computers. Take the opening paragraph of a 1993 column where Jillette eventually talks about computer games:

My high school English teacher (the first to tell me that I comment parenthetically too often) is still a buddy of mine. Last time we talked, she told me about a schizophrenic that worked with her husband, years ago, at a foundry. After being institutionalized a few times, this troubled co-worker had found his personal secret to keeping sane enough to stay an out-patient: The daily paper he read every morning was exactly 6 months old. Every day he read the news from 24 weeks before. The perspective this gave him trickled into the rest of his life. It’s a little nutty, but, hey, it kept him in the real world.

Eventually my dad stopped subscribing to the magazine and I lost track of the columns. But it wasn’t as if Jillette’s writing disappeared off the planet, as he continued to contribute to a wide variety of places in keeping with his libertarian and outspoken interests.

And now he’s made the jump to novels. Hell, at the very least, it’s going to be interesting.