Lies & Misdirection

By Gregory Frye.

The Contortionist’s Handbook, Craig Clevenger, MacAdam/Cage, 2010 re-issue

The Contortionist’s Handbook is one of the smoothest, darkest, most fun books I’ve read in sometime. Of course my curiosity usually piques to themes of drug addiction, mental illness and criminal behavior, not to mention damn good writing.

John Dolan Vincent, the protagonist and narrator of Craig Clevenger‘s debut novel, is a master forger, although he would hate the label. Vincent is able to replicate birth certificates, driver’s licenses, social security cards, credit and employment history, and even anecdotes from the family life he never had. He continually creates new identities for himself in order to elude mental and legal authorities.

Vincent is a mathematical genius, can look at a room or a piece of furniture and immediately understand the dimensions. He probably even knows the exact weight of a line of cocaine before he snorts it, although he’s been known to make mistakes with pills.

In fact, that’s how we meet Vincent. The book starts out with him listing his handful of overdoses, all of them unintentional. He gets these massive headaches, which he calls godsplitters, unexplainable four-day migraines so intense that he’ll gobble down any pharmaceutical that might help. He loses consciousness, zones in and out, and usually wakes up in the ER having his stomach pumped on suicide watch.

This is where the identity changes come in. Obviously, if the doctors see a person overdose more than once, they’re going to lock him in a padded room with a steady diet of mind-numbing pills, board games and television.

Throughout the narrative, the reader witnesses Vincent after his most recent overdose. He works his way through a mental evaluation, using his fake identity and a made-up history to prove he’s not a suicide threat. This conversation with the Evaluator is juxtaposed with flashbacks that lead us through Vincent’s real history, a collection of dark episodes that explain how Vincent got into forgery and why he would want to get away from his past to begin with.

Here the narrator describes the evaluation room:

“Brushed steel tabletop curving all the way down the edge and under, one piece of welded smoothness. Guys will rip the aluminum or plastic edge off a table if there is one, cut someone’s throat or slit their own wrists if they’re certain the doctors are alien-funded drones out to swap their prostate for a tracking chip. I’ve met guys like that.”

And here:

“Watercolor seascapes and sunsets. No Van Gogh. No Picasso. No borderline disorders or schizophrenia leaking through a reproduction to set off any alarms with a new patient.”

Clevenger strikes a razor edge balance between the flashbacks and the mental evaluation, a dichotomy that allows for greater appreciation of Vincent’s ability to create a new identity and exercise complete manipulation over the legal system. Simultaneously, there is something rewarding about learning Vincent’s true history because in a life of lies and misdirection we feel privileged, that we’re the only ones who know Vincent’s past.

This sense of dead honesty pulls at the reader’s heart while Clevenger’s meticulous knowledge in the area of forgery wins over the brain.

Topping all this off is a style that is as smooth and dynamic as a vintage jazz record, the hypnotic prose and fascinating details of Vincent’s life suck you into the narrative. You learn how to forge a new identity and peek in on some of the secrets behind the walls of a mental asylum.

Clevenger quit his job to write this book. He dropped off the face of the earth and lived off credit cards. After almost two years and twenty drafts, we’ve got a book that will probably survive its author.

Vincent’s story is dark, like some God awful train wreck that keeps crashing over and over, and you can’t stop staring, can’t stop reading. And with writing this good, who would want to turn away?

The Contortionist’s Handbook has just undergone its sixth printing with MacAdam/Cage. Better buy a copy before it’s hard to find again.