30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical, entertaining combination of highbrow and lowbrow, December 3, 2002
My favorite novels, particularly historical novels, perfectly capture the era in which they are set not just in the character and setting but also in the style they are written. I like my Victorian novels epic and sooty, for example. "Carter Beats the Devil", based (VERY loosely) on the actual life and career of Charles Carter (NOT Houdini, as implied by some other reviewers), a turn-of-the century magician, perfectly brings to life the 1920s era.
The elaborate, tricky, and slightly melodramatic plot leaves me wondering 'what next' like an old "Perils of Pauline" silent film (the ones with the dame tied to the railroad tracks). It has the slightly slapstick quality of those movies, too. Even the modest romantic interludes have a 20s sincerity to them. It's as thrilling as a summer blockbuster movie, circa 1927.
Since the book had a reputation as a 'literary' novel, I was surprised how well it worked as sheer entertainment. This doesn't mean it lacks depth, though. Carter (the magician character) is not what you think he is, a mystery to be worked out. The same is true of many of the characters. The author gets you to think about the meaning of deception and honesty, escape and confinement, even the price and value of freedom.
It's even more interesting to read because Gold borrows techniques from magic itself to accomplish this; the author is quite adept at slight-of-hand and misdirection. You will not soon guess how it ends!
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36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Joy to Read, October 10, 2001
I must confesss that I do not know what drove me to buy this book in the first place. I usually read business books and biographies. But for reasons that I do not recall, I stumbled across Carter Beats the Devil and bought it. I don't usually buy books of this genre. In fact, I am not really sure of the genre itself; Zelig and Ragtime come close but not quite there. I have concluded that Carter himself must have directed me to pick this card, I mean, book.
I found the book to be extraordinarly well written. The plot is full of quirky characters and twists that would be unbelievable but for the threads of historical fact (very loose factual threads actually) woven throughout. It's a real page turner and if you stick with all 500 pages or so, immensely satisfying. Over the past two weeks, whenever the reality of current events became oppressive, I escaped into the world of San Francisco of the 1920s painted gloriously (and with author's license) by Mr. Gold. Many a night ended with my wife asking me to please put the book down and turn off the light!
I look forward to reading the author's next work with much anticipation.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If vaudeville were this much fun, it'd still be alive, January 26, 2002
Great literature this isn't, but grand, smart, sure-footed entertainment it is. Glen David Gold takes his readers on a twisting, rocketing roller coaster ride, and he is in full command of his effects, from the moment we step into the car until the moment it pulls to a gentle stop and we begin to breathe again.
The blurbs and the opening pages contain some of the trappings of a murder mystery, in the matter of President Harding's untimely death and the puzzle of what role, if any, the world-famous magician Carter the Great had to play in it. In fact, I bought the book because I have a neighbor with whom I swap off murder mysteries every couple of months. It's not exactly a bait and switch, and the puzzle is eventually resolved, but it is a bit of misdirection. The Harding subplot forms the bookends, not the book. I found I didn't mind in the least.
What we really get is more of a Bildungsroman than a whodunit: the story of Charles Carter's induction into the realm of stage magic, and the arc of his career. Along the way, Gold fully immerses us in two worlds just distant enough from us to be wonderfully exotic: the world of vaudeville in the final days before it was killed off by the talkies, and the world of the San Francisco upper crust as the twenties were beginning to roar.
It's reminiscent of Michael Chabon's "Kavalier and Clay" in the way it makes us part of a small fraternity of hardscrabble entertainers in the golden age of a genre, and the way we get to feel the dirt of their trade under our fingernails. (As it happens, the two books have massively intersecting acknowledgment pages.) But it lacks the high seriousness of Chabon's work.
It's also reminiscent, of course, of Ragtime, in its re-creation of an era and its free mixing of real with fictional characters. But I liked this better than Ragtime or its host of imitators. Too large a part of the appeal of such books is the thrill of hobnobbing with celebrities. Of the many delightfully particular characters from real history in "Carter," there are scarcely any I'd heard of before. Just the two aitches, Harding and Houdini. Okay, I did recognize Groucho Marx's incognito cameo, from a time before the brothers adopted their stage names, but most readers won't, and his scenes work just fine if they don't. Carter himself, his family, the rival madames of San Francisco's two classiest brothels, the teenaged inventor of television, the philanthropic borax king Francis Smith - they were all news to me. And none of the historicals is introduced to titillate the reader with a People Magazine fix; each is a pleasure to know in his or her own right, and each moves the storyline briskly along.
When Mr. Gold graces us with his second novel, I will definitely be standing in line for it.
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