By William Boyle. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)
Forgive me, but I’m obligated to begin this way: Bluff (The Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic) by Michael Kardos has some killer tricks up its sleeve.
Set in Kardos’s native New Jersey, the novel starts with close-up magician Natalie Webb, on the verge of being washed up at 27, almost blinding a smarmy lawyer at a corporate holiday show by throwing a playing card at his eye. It’s a compelling and darkly funny opening, one that sets the tone for the rest of what’s to come: a book that expertly walks the line between breeziness and brutality.
As Natalie treads water, she tries to make some extra cash by following up on an offer to write a magazine article about poker cheats. From there, Natalie is set up with a grizzled card hustler named Ace who takes her to a private game held in a bakery. To reveal more than this would be to ruin one of the book’s many surprises.
Suffice to say, the book lulls you into believing you know where the narrative is heading and then it jolts you in a new direction. When Natalie winds up as a central piece of a big game with over a million dollars on the line, Kardos’s choices become particularly innovative and intriguing.
Little by little, Natalie’s backstory is revealed, as well: her complicated family history, her apprenticeship with the magician Jack Clarion, her fall from grace at the World of Magic competition. This is never overwhelming or distracting, and Kardos keeps us firmly grounded in the present while letting us know what we need to know about Natalie to understand her motivations, her craftiness, her cynicism.
Natalie is an endearing protagonist. I can’t remember rooting as hard for someone in anything I’ve read lately. She reminds me of Elmore Leonard’s great heroines, especially Jackie Burke and Karen Sisco. Natalie is hardened by experience, funny, capable of great sympathy, and she’s our moral guide here. The product of deceit at the hands of powerful men, we’re cheering for her world to be set right.
The book is populated with memorable, almost Dickensian characters: there’s Ace, the card cheat Natalie hooks up with for the potential profile; Emily, whose slick play in the bakery game impresses Natalie so much she become fixated on her; Cool Calvin, a neighbor boy who first tries to shake her down and later becomes her apprentice (of sorts); Harley, her kind-hearted upstairs neighbor, who takes in stray dogs; Brock McKnight, the lawyer who offers to help with her case because he desperately wants to understand her Four Queens trick; and Victor Flowers, a New Jersey power player who threads his way from her haunted past all the way to her uncertain present.
The work is also wildly cinematic. I kept thinking this would be a tailor-made adaptation for a director like Steven Soderbergh. It’s got the same sort of lightness on its feet as some of Soderbergh’s crime caper pictures. It also has the raw energy of Robert Altman’s classic California Split and the aesthetic values of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s recent Mississippi Grind.
Bluff, as I’ve said, is full of surprises. None of which I aim to spoil here. It’s at turns tender and tough, a book that’s comfortable roaming into Thin Man territory as it is exploring the violent consequences of getting involved with the wrong people.
Like any great magician, Kardos, who teaches creative writing at Mississippi State, encourages his audience to get totally wrapped up in the world of his act. And this act, ladies and gentlemen, is a pure delight.
William Boye of Oxford is originally from Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the crime novels Gravesend and, this summer, The Lonely Witness.
Michael Kardos will be at Lemuria tomorrow, Tuesday, April 24, at 5:00 to sign and read from Bluff.
Comments are closed.