If the child makes the man, as they always say, then those formative years must be essential material for any essayist or critic. A “normal” childhood might be a fine background for news reporting or fact-juggling journalism. But to bring a unique perspective to the work—to reflect on reality from unanticipated angles—that’s the stuff of rare birds.
John-Ivan Palmer certainly comes with the right credentials. The fiction writer-essayist grew up under most unusual circumstances. During the interval between the end of World War II and the advent of Interstate highways, he traveled the country with his parents in an unheated trailer. Dad was a stage magician and mom his “lovely assistant” as they circled around a dingy circuit of lodges and county fairs, usually billed alongside ventriloquists contortionists and comedians. Dad made enough to get by. Although the little family was cramped together for long hours, he never knew his father well.
Writing with the voice of experience, Palmer lifts the tacky curtain on a world gone away. Tawdry but exciting, the back stages were crowded with entertainers who survived on quick wits and by producing a trick or two from their sleeves—they could eat apples while juggling them, taunt hecklers through dummies on both knees or tap dance with a peg leg.
“In the 1950s people physically interacted with each other a great deal more than they do today,” Palmer writes, explaining the audience. Television hadn’t yet occupied the minds and diverted the attention of the nation. And perhaps the most incredible feat from today’s perspective is that the card tricksters and sword swallowers never feared being stiffed by promoters. They worked at a guaranteed (if low) rate, enforced by a strong union (the American Guild of Variety Artists) that tolerated no nonsense. Master of Deception is fun to read—and revealing of a past still in living if fading memory.
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