Telling tall tales

‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date,’ says Glen David Gold. I emerged from his weighty memoir feeling more like I’d been through a marriage: sadder, wiser, still sifting the decades of detail for the moments when a little self-awareness could have spared hearts.

My crush on Gold’s writing dates back to his sensational 2001 debut novel: Carter Beats the Devil. Set in the author’s native California in the 1920s, the tale of rival magicians combined seductively complex characters, wisecracking dialogue and vintage Americana in a plot as ingeniously designed and expertly sprung as an escapologist’s stage. Sunnyside, published in 2009, saw a shift in subject from live-action illusions to Hollywood hocus pocus, underscored by a deepening melancholy.

Both novels shuffled loaded decks of fact and fiction, including real characters such as Harry Houdini and Charlie Chaplin who both existed, in turn, as figures of infinitely refracted truth and fantasy.