From the mouth of a sock monkey
Penn Jillette has a theory about how to be a commercially successful writer. He calls it the grocery-store approach.
In the old days, about 150 years ago, Jillette says, a writer needed to reach about 3 to 5 percent of the public in order to make it. Now, with so many more people in the world, a novelist can thrive by attracting just a fraction of that population.
"You really can do the gay Catholic fisherman and make a living," Jillette says. "When you go to the supermarket, not everything is
Jillette -- the tall, talking half of the meta-magicians known as Penn & Teller -- doesn't want to raise expectations for his debut novel, "Sock," out this month on St. Martin's Press. He's proud of the work, which he'll read from and sign Wednesday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline.
But he has good reason to wonder about the book's commercial potential. For one thing, the novel is told in the first person from the perspective of a sock monkey named "Dickie" who belongs to a New York City police diver. This stuffed sock has a dirty mind, doesn't believe in God, and peppers his narration with lyrical bites from the Beatles, the J. Geils Band, and the Village People. The result is a sometimes dark, sometimes hilarious story that's framed by sex, death, and pop culture.
"This isn't a Tom Clancy book or something in the `Left Behind' series," says Jillette. "I'll be happy if people say it's a pretty good book by some [expletive] Vegas magician that's just fine on the shelf with those weird, crinkly olives."
He hasn't always been a Vegas magician.
Jillette, 49, grew up in Greenfield, and, after meeting Teller in Amherst at something called the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music, they began to work together. Jillette could juggle, and Teller knew magic tricks. This eventually became their act, which had been on Broadway, David Letterman, and "Saturday Night Live" by the time they went West, eventually settling into a residency at the Rio casino in Las Vegas.
In addition to their Vegas show, Penn & Teller star in a series on Showtime, "Bull[expletive]," now in its second season, in which they attack people they believe to be frauds, whether they be creationists or psychics.
"Sock" started as a side project. Jillette agreed to write an essay for Arne Svenson's 2003 book, "Sock Monkeys: 200 out of 1,863." The idea for a book came when Jillette e-mailed his chapter to a writer friend, Nell Scovell.
Her response, on Dec. 26, 2000, was to the point.
"I'm so excited. Oh, oh, oh. I can't wait to read it. Tell the sock monkey's tale. If you don't, who will?"
Jillette had been thinking about writing a novel.
"He knew the sock monkey was the way, in but whose sock monkey was it?" says Scovell. "And he was telling me this story about a real-life New York City diver, a policeman, and I think I did say, `What if he had a sock monkey?' "
Urged on by Scovell, Jillette developed a routine. In Vegas, Teller generally has dinner at home before the nightly show. Jillette went to
As he wrote, he found himself drawn to the freedom of fiction. He could write in his voice. He could draw on real stories. He could deal with the most painful moments of his life, particularly the death of his parents over the previous two years. He could even fudge stuff, either not telling the full story or changing names and circumstances.
"For me, a guy who spent 30 years walking onstage and saying, `My name is Penn Jillette and this is my partner, Teller,' it was a whole different thing," he says. "Once I got ahold of telling it so artificially through the point of view of a sock monkey -- [the story] is a love triangle between a straight man, gay man, and gay woman -- it just seemed kind of easy."
The writing wasn't always easy. Two years would separate Jillette's first e-mail to Scovell and the final chapter.
"Sometimes chapters would come once a day for a week, and then they would stop for a week or two and then they'd start again," says Scovell.
The final product, "Sock," is thick on pop culture, profane in spots, and blends the dark with the humorous. It takes on organized religion and death. It is also, Jillette's fans will be pleased to know, told with the same edgy, sarcastic tone that has made him so distinctive, whether on "Howard Stern" or onstage.
For Jillette, the motivation to write a novel came from the deaths of his parents. His father died in 1999. His mother the following year. "I had a perfect relationship with my mom and dad," says Gillette. "I called them every day of my life and I was really quite a mama's boy."
When they got sick, Jillette had to face his almost lifelong status as an atheist. Friends told him he would find God when his parents died. Another friend came up with the phrase "epistemological hedonism: If it feels good, believe it."
But there, with his dying mother, Jillette wasn't about to change his belief system.
"She would say, `Why is this happening to me?' " Jillette remembers. "And I'd say the great thing is, no reason. You didn't do anything wrong. It's just random, bad chance. That doesn't take away the pain. It does take away the spook show."
"My girlfriend said, `You're really going to put this out?' " he recounts. "It's so personal. I said, the memo I saw was that that's what you're supposed to do in show business."
By the time he finished "Sock," Jillette knew he wanted it published. But would anybody want to put out a book with a talking sock monkey? Jillette sent it off to his office, expecting to hear that this wasn't really the kind of book a major publisher would like. He was particularly sensitive about annoying fans of Penn & Teller's 30-year act.
"It's not a magic book," he says. "As a matter of fact, I don't think anywhere in it does it mention magic. This is not the kind of thing Siegfried and Roy would have sold after a show. It's not a Lance Burton vehicle. I'm not trying to hype anybody. I'm just trying with this book to treat people the way I want to be treated."
In the end, St. Martin's Press picked up "Sock."
Jillette explains that the police diver isn't him. But there's much the character and the author have in common, from the physical ("He's 6-6, . . . He's not really fat, not for America, but he has a belly. . . . He has all his hair") to the philosophical ("He doesn't want to get over his mom's and dad's death. Why would the Little Fool want that? You want closure, get a door"). The book is 48 chapters, one for each year of Jillette's life up to the completion of the novel.
"It's all fiction. No one in the book is real," Jillette writes in the afterward, tongue-in-cheek. "I'm tall but I'm not a [expletive] police diver.' "
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.
