FELONY JUGGLER

An ambitious but aimless street hustler becomes a rolling stone when he’s dragged into a bank job gone awry.

What to make of a character who’s so much like his creator—gifted in weird and dazzling ways, prone to misadventure, and with a persistent habit of talking about his junk? This could be the fictional biography of the verbal half of Penn & Teller had things gone badly wrong once. Here the raconteur injects himself into lead character Poe Legette, a well-meaning ne’er-do-well making his way through the rock ’n’ roll 1970s. Poe is a graduate of clown college—really—who’s raking in fat stacks as a comic juggler in Philly. Things go awry when a pal ropes him into a half-assed bank robbery, during which a bystander is killed. Panicked and on the run, he heads for the first place that comes to mind: Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of one Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan (“I didn’t have a guitar, but I had balls”). There, he changes his name, falls in love with an implausibly oversexed librarian named Marion, and reinvents himself as a Renaissance Faire axe-juggler. But when the consequences of his actions follow him to his newly adopted home, Poe must rely on his loud mouth and quick wits to get out of mortal danger. Since his debut novel, Sock (2004), Jillette has generally married his whip-smart, raunchy sense of humor to hard-boiled plots, but there's less gunplay and femme fatales here than you’d expect from this sort of thing. We do learn lots of fascinating shop talk, from the nuts and bolts of juggling to “cold reading” a mark to crowd work. What remains is a very funny, oft-vulgar cautionary tale that doesn’t pull any punches, even about ol’ Bob himself. “The whole idea of genius,” Poe scoffs. “Everything is just hard work. Everything is juggling.”

A fast-talking, ball-juggling tall tale about long shots, escape attempts, and other bad decisions.