Volume 3, No. 13 February 14, 2003
Gold strikes gold A Review By Hannah Pittard American fiction is in the midst of a revitalization of the epic adventure. Fantastical stories of great wins and losses of the early 20th century (such as Michael Chabon’s "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay") seem once again to be taking their places on the "Notable Book" shelves, and Glen David Gold’s "Carter Beats the Devil," which is a New York Times Notable Book itself, is very much in tune with the recent reemergence of this genre. The book’s opening faithfully foreshadows the magnitude, audacity and grandeur of the 480-page story that follows: "On Friday, August third, 1923, the morning after President Harding’s death, reporters followed the widow, the Vice President, and Charles Carter, the magician." Unlike many novels whose first sentences promise more than they can deliver (see "The sound of the ‘Fury,’" The Campus Chronicle, Jan. 17 issue), Gold’s story not only sustains the lavishness of his plot — a magician, Charles Carter a.k.a. Carter the Great, who may or may not have had a hand in the seemingly benign death of the president of the United States, the timing of which (two hours after the close of a curtain) implicates the young magician just as much as the mystery that surrounds him — but the author ultimately delivers a fine example of 21st-century writing. Perhaps most impressive about "Carter Beats the Devil" is the speed at which it begs to be read. This is not a novel whose tangled and gnarled sentences require that you first untangle and ungnarl them before understanding them, much less moving on to the next sentence. This is a novel whose language is direct, whose words are simple but whose meaning is full. There is something Raymond Chandler-esque about Gold’s writing and Chabon-esque about his story that is completely enticing. That said, it is important to realize that Gold’s writing, though strong, is not as strong as his ability to tell a story. Where Chabon both tells a great story and sets new standards for the literature of his peers, Gold merely creates a richly imagined fantasy world amidst charmingly pompous quotes by Albert Einstein and Howard Thurston and through which we, as the audience, are happily free to wander. "Carter Beats the Devil" is available at Ex Libris bookstore, 228 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
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