Nightmare Alley, Gresham (1946)
4.0 Stars
1-20-2022

Get this man a dog, stat.

A grimmmmmm book that follows an unhappy young man as he becomes an unhappy older man. Stanton starts off doing magic tricks as a carnie, and from there learns how to do cold readings & mentalist tricks, then graduates to doing his own stage shows, then to starting a new-age religion and scamming a congregation of well off older ladies, and finally moves on to his biggest con, swindling an industrialist out of a part of his enormous fortune. During this entire process Stanton is deceitful, contemptuous, and terrible to other people, and is himself often miserable as these traits become the only colors he can perceive in the world. So get ready for a cynical and drawn out slog with this book.

And yet...the book has qualities. The writing is solid, occasionally excellent. There is a ton of technical detail; one of the reasons the book is so long is that the author describes precisely how each of the various scams/illusions works. There's also an agreeably elevated consciousness by the author; the core of the book is grim, but there are decent people in its world. They're just not the ones the protagonist is hanging out with. There is a surprising amount of carnie solidarity, and there's a fair amount of meta-introspection as side characters question the nature of the protagonist. E.g. the psychologist who points out his Oedipal-issues-starter-pack, and the sex-positive socialist who points out how many of Stanton's problems are of his own creation, i.e. he's bringing his own meta-physical/moral baggage along & dumping it on the world and then complaining about the picture of the world that he has created. Also, the book is pretty consistently ACAB. Also, gets the fundamental connection between ministers/shamans/psychologists/cold-but-alluring-Swedish-dominatrixes.

So I very much liked the book both for its portrayal of early 1900's America, and for a surprisingly developed understanding of that world.

Other trivia: the author (Gresham) fought in the Spanish Civil War, against the fascists/Catholics. (Not a good war, but it did produce a lot of good writers). Despite that Gresham was pretty bad in a lot of ways, e.g. heavy drinking and adultery in his later years. His wife divorced him, and then she went on to marry CS Lewis. Gresham went on to commit suicide by pills, something he mentions in Nightmare Alley.