Penn Jillette, the towering, ponytailed half of the enduring magic duo Penn & Teller, has never been shy about storytelling. In fact, for most of his career, he’s made a living of it — spinning illusions onstage, offering dry, acerbic commentary on everything from pseudoscience to patriotism, and occasionally smashing things in the name of truth.
Those of us who have followed his writing career subscribed to Road Penn, his early blogging observations about life and career, have read the two magic books he’s “penned” with his silent magical partner and Random his first bestseller about a Vegas gambler who makes life decisions based on the roll of the dice. He’s also written God, No! a non-fiction exploration of his well known atheism.
Now, at seventy, Jillette has conjured his latest: Felony Juggler, a novel that masquerades as fiction but walks a tightrope between memoir and myth.
At first glance, the book’s premise is absurd in a delightfully Jillettean way: A Philadelphia street juggler in the 1970s gets roped into a bank heist, someone dies, and the would-be criminal escapes to a Renaissance fair in the Midwest. What unfolds is part caper, part coming-of-age tale, and part cultural artifact, a fever-dream recollection of pre-fame wandering with just enough blood and blunder to turn the whole thing sideways.
Jillette, in conversation with People Magazine, insists he’s never committed a felony. “Every interaction up to the crime is true,” he says, with the same sly certainty he’s used to sell card tricks to skeptical audiences for decades. The only difference between him and Poe, his fictional stand-in, is the answer to a single question. Poe says yes to the crime. Jillette, in real life, said no.
This literary sleight-of-hand — the memoir disguised as a novel — is nothing new. But Jillette approaches it with the earnest mischief of a magician whose greatest trick might be his own biography. He cites Bob Dylan as a model: Dylan, who wove tall tales of carnivals and boxcars into his early mythos, gave Jillette the idea that fiction could be autobiographical in its own way — a mirror warped just enough to show something truer than truth.
The book, which Jillette began writing as he and Teller neared their 50th anniversary as partners in deception, revisits the loamy chaos of the 1970s counterculture. It’s a period Jillette remembers not as a golden age, but as a testing ground for show business in its most elemental form — a time of hot asphalt, cold audience stares, and the kind of desperation that can only come from working a street corner with bowling pins and a tip hat.
“It’s all the same job,” Jillette muses. “Whether you’re doing magic in Vegas or playing a mall Santa — it’s all show business.” This may sound like an aphorism, but it’s a deeply held belief. For Jillette, the hierarchy of performance is an illusion. He sees continuity where others see class. The Broadway stage and the blacktop are not opposites — they are echoes.
There’s something poignant, even a little haunting, in the idea of Jillette revisiting his past not as a memoirist but as a novelist. The novel, he says, was easier than autobiography — less clinical, less self-conscious. It allowed him to tell the same stories he’s told “a hundred times,” only now they unfold with urgency and stakes. There’s blood. There’s flight. And, crucially, there’s narrative symmetry — something real life rarely offers.
At one point in the People conversation, Jillette describes writing as “blushingly intimate.” This from a man who has spent a lifetime onstage, often yelling. But books, he says, are lonelier than performance. They require trust. They’re decoded in private. And the best ones — like the best illusions — leave the audience wondering how it was done, and how much of it was ever real.
Felony Juggler may not answer that question, but then again, neither does Jillette. That’s the trick: to hold something up to the light and make you believe it’s solid, even as it disappears in your hands.
Felony Juggler is out now, wherever books are sold — though, if Jillette had his way, you’d find it on the same shelf as the mall Santas and Picasso.