Along with his silent partner Teller, magician and artistic jack-of-all-trades Penn Jillette has made a career-long commitment to debunking the pretentious, the deceptive, and the artificially mysterious via stage shows, books, television specials, and the cable series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! So it's tempting to see Jillette's debut novel, Sock, as a sly, deflating parody of postmodern fiction. But even a generous interpretation doesn't make Sock easier or more interesting to read. Jillette invests the book with nonstop pop-cultural references, diversionary lectures, embedded short fiction, and grandiose philosophical ruminations, but at its heart, it's still a painfully sluggish crime procedural, told almost entirely from the point of view of an attitudinal sock monkey.
Jillette's protagonist introduces himself in a series of brief but sludgy and repetitive chapters, written in a stream-of-consciousness, gunfire-abrupt style that comes and goes throughout Sock, preventing it from finding a smooth narrative flow. The monkey goes on to introduce his owner, whom he calls "the Little Fool," even once the Little Fool grows up and becomes a professional diver for the New York City police. Subsequent chapters each reveal a facet or two of the Little Fool's life, fetishistically pawing over and circling around each detail at punishing length. But the plot finally kicks into gear once the Little Fool finds the submerged corpse of his brutally murdered former lover, and becomes so obsessed with finding her killer that he begins interfering with the actual police investigation.
On some level, the story has potential. Sock isn't a standard police procedural, because the Little Fool isn't a cop; he's an obsessive, unhealthy outsider, redefining his relationship with a dead woman in order to give his life meaning, and in the process, reconstructing his perspective on the world in potentially revelatory ways. But the sock-monkey-protagonist gimmick twists his perspective from intriguingly off-kilter to disturbingly off-kilter, and throws almost as much obfuscation into the mix as the punchy writing style and the song lyrics and movie quotes that pop up in nearly every paragraph. Rather than giving Sock a place in the pop-culture lexicon, the nonstop referents and endless rabbit trails feel like meaningless noise, a magician's distraction from the real sleight-of-hand going on under the table. Unfortunately for Jillette, what works in magic rarely works in fiction. All the empty flash doesn't make Sock seem bigger and brighter; it just puts a lot of meaningless plodding in front of the minor hat trick at the end of the book.