SECOND POCKET FIRST is a twenty-first century picaresque novel. In the guise of gentleman thief Issey, author Gregory Grosvenor has created an interesting protagonist whose peculiarly wayward moral compass marks him out as not quite of our times.
That, of course, is entirely the point. As a thief, he is a successful failure, or perhaps a failed success: good at picking locks, but not at lifting fine valuables; good at slipping into this or that well-heeled New England house, but not at avoiding getting beaten up (or indeed thrown out of the burglars’ ring whose membership he so craves); good at lying on the fly, but not at escaping the consequences of those deceptions. The issue is simple: it’s not the result, but the process Issey craves—“the poetry of entering” someone else’s sitting room, the thrill of taking someone else’s property. Hence his irresistible urge to steal the contents of plane passengers’ pockets, children’s toys, and even the cars of his own rich brother and his disinterested wife—two “sphinxes without riddles,” as Issey puts it.
The style is luscious. Issey fancies himself an aesthete, with an eye for fine vases, silver, and women, though his lascivious demeanor never segues into bawdiness. Neither does the language; Grosvenor’s rhetorical flourishes meander, but they are never crude. He spends much time examining Issey’s psyche. Issey is an interesting character, but one struggles to know what to make of him. Though he is plainly set up to elicit the reader’s sympathies, there are misgivings. He is a strange mixture—too timid to tell people exactly what he thinks of them but inwardly dismissive of them: “People are greedy and people are stupid.” He is a misanthrope, or something very close to one, so tolerance of him is entirely dependent on how the reader feels about misanthropes—at least, until love (genuine, unabashed love) comes his way.
Once one has established his background and modus operandi, the chief pleasure of the book derives from the scrapes he gets himself into, the compulsive way in which he goes about so much of his stealing. A sequence in which his niece is foisted upon him for the evening, which compels him to plan his heist around the need to care for her, is ridiculous in the best possible way.
Some of the scene-setting could be toned down a notch. Grosvenor has a wicked way of summing up those around Issey in a few incisive sentences, adding detail and hints of backstory. Once these miniatures are conjured, however, he sometimes struggles to do anything with them. It is often the case that a background character, because that is what they are, ought not to have too much of the spotlight on them. Pacing could perhaps stand some scrutiny also: one-third of the novel has gone by before the romance that forms the main business of the book comes into focus. Nevertheless, SECOND POCKET FIRST is a good, wry, and sometimes affecting read.
Gregory Grosvenor’s SECOND POCKET FIRST succeeds as picaresque entertainment with an interesting protagonist.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader