BOOK REVIEW: 'Eyeing the Flash: The Education of a Carnival Con Artist'




Here's the slightly longer "Director's Cut" of my book review in today's Oregonian BooksWeek:
____________________

I didn't believe a word of Peter Fenton's memoir, "Eyeing the Flash."

That's not meant as an insult.

This hugely entertaining book is, after all, subtitled "The Education of a Carnival Con Artist." It opens in medias res, in 1967, with 17-year-old Fenton about to come to blows with Jackie Barron -- his best friend, employer and all-around bad influence on the Midwest carnival circuit.

Jackie, you see, just got an inkling that Fenton's been stealing cash scored off the marks roving his attractions.

But then, as Fenton writes, "I'd been skimming money because I'd discovered he was paying me far less than my fair share." Which leaves these complicated friends with their fingers wrapped around the loose parts of a carnival attraction called "The Swinger" -- ready to do some swinging of their own if that roll of cash that just fell out of Fenton's pant leg is what Jackie thinks it is.

It's a brisk start, and emblematic of the rest of the book -- fast-moving, fast-talking, kind of overcooked in the dialogue department. It's also, as befits the subject, grimy and tantalizing.

Mr. Fenton is a published humorist who spent a decade-and-a-half in the employ of The National Enquirer. That, combined with his fast rise as a carnival agent, has polished his prose to a zirconium sheen. There's nary a wasted word in "Eyeing the Flash"; every chapter crackles with structure and punchlines. It's a great read, the sort of book where everyone -- be they teenager or Flat Store-man -- talks in a fast-paced patter that makes them sound, in your mind's ear, like 45-year-old character actors from the Bronx.

To wit: "In life, there are two kinds of people -- ulcer-givers and ulcer-getters," Jackie (a Vitalis-drenched high-school sophomore) tells Pete shortly before handing him a copy of "John Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling." For Fenton, it's a revelatory moment. The product of a miserable family life -- with a drunk father "who'd tragically tripped and fallen into a vat thick with hops and barley, never to be seen again" -- the author finds he has a misanthropic streak well-suited to the grift.

(Which is, of course, that's why I don't believe a sentence of his book. I should stress here that I'm not calling Fenton a liar: I'm sure all of "Eyeing the Flash" actually happened -- just maybe not with everyone speaking in dialogue so relentlessly sharp. But then, given the subject matter, a little larger-than-life patter is thematically apt, isn't it?)

What follows is a sort of evil Horatio Alger story -- with Pete applying his genius for number-crunching to basement casinos, then to working over saps as a "carnival agent." Throw in on-the-fly elephant-wrangling, scumbags with nicknames like "The Ghost" and "The Flopper," acres of mud and a growing hostility between the two friends, and you have an action-packed read that revels in Fenton's obvious enthusiasm for the con.

Best of all, "Eyeing the Flash" rewards your double-saw with more than a stuffed toy. Fenton excels, really excels, at scene-setting. He's a master of detail. In a few short pages, he gives you a working taxonomy of carny life that lends it a real humanity -- even as he opens the con man's bag of tricks to confirm your worst fears.

This isn't a book with a "redemption arc" for its protagonist. Fenton seems to have genuinely delighted in being, as he puts it, "constitutionally suited to becoming part of an us-versus-them world -- 'us' being the smart folks, cons and carnies; 'them' being the fools, suckers and marks, also known as everyone else on the face of the earth." In fact, the book's final pages are devoted to Jackie and Pete's day-long battle to see who can squeeze the most marks in "a junked-up, neon-lit planet, a tawdry, traveling Times Square where no one cared about who I was or where I came from because they assumed any story I, a fellow carny, told was a lie."

That Pete's "relatively honest" in this world makes him worth Jackie's time. And yours.

The Confidence Man (Oregonian BooksWeek, Jan. 9, 2004)



Posted: Sun - January 9, 2005 at 10:48 AM        

|

©