Essay Questions

The book opens with the narrator recalling an emotionally distraught viewing of a performance of a play based on Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. How will this choice prove to be a work of sly genius?

The story of Oliver is one of the most familiar in the Dickens canon. One need have actually read the novel to know it is a story of a poor innocent orphan thrown into a world of street urchins guided in the art of being pickpockets by the complicated Fagin and constantly under the threat of the menacing figure of Bill Sikes. As such, this quick delineation of audience members becoming emotionally overwhelmed at the scene where Bill murders Nancy seems like nothing more than an allusion to world of Victorian fingersmiths almost universal in its instant identification.

The surprisingly detailed description passes by so quickly that it hardly seems capable of possessing guile. And yet, it will eventually prove to be a powerfully obvious foreshadowing of what has become the most famous element of the novel: the multiple plot twists capable of leaving readers just as emotionally shellshocked as those outraged witnesses to the faked murder of an actress merely playing the part Nancy by an actor playing Bill. Oliver Twist is used by the author as gigantic warning sign hidden in plain sight of all her twists that lie in wait for unsuspecting readers about to have their socks knocked off.

What point is being made by the final unexpected twist in which Maud makes the transformation from reader to writer?

Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, it does come as something of a shock that the story ends with Maud having gone from being a reader of a certain genre of books to making a living by writing within that same genre. By that point, her revulsion for her job as reader is hardly a secret. The embrace of something she reviles is pure human nature and so Maud can hardly be faulted on that score, but the author’s decision to pursue this human flaw is about something deeper. Being a reader of stories written by others symbolized Maud’s earlier existence as one in which her own story was being written others. By reversing the order and becoming not the interpreter but the creator, her position later in life is representative of people who empower themselves by taking charge of being the author of their own narrative.

The term “pigeon” is used extensively to denote a clueless victim of a con, but what longer related terminology is also working pervasively throughout the narrative?

A pigeon as slang appropriately reflects the simplistic attitude toward the targets of cons. Those looking for a “mark” to make a buck are sizing up the potential for a person to be of either sophisticated intellectual development to recognize criminal activity or to have enough experience to recognize criminal intentions. In most cases—not all, obviously, but certainly most—the aim is to make a quick score so there simply is not enough time to gather the necessary information to ensure the pigeon is gullible, stupid or unworldly enough. Usually, it is a gut decision based on past experiences.

In essence, then, the con is pigeonholing the entire population into at least two categories: those who can be quickly duped and those who probably can but are better left alone. Pigeonholing is a more complex exhibition of the process of marking a person as a potential pigeon and it is one that is central to the narrative. At every turn, characters are sizing up others and putting them into pigeonholes of their own design: the decision to turn a complex person into a more predictable stereotype winds up making every character a pigeon themselves in their own flawed mechanics of running a con.