E-Mail This Article to a Friend Penn on paper Half of the legendary comedy duo Penn & Teller ventures into uncharted territory with a twisted new novel BY TAMARA WIEDER

IT SHOULD COME as no surprise to fans of Penn & Teller that Penn Jillette — invariably described as "the larger, louder half" of the comedy duo — is equal parts wacky and intelligent, boisterous and thoughtful. But what may surprise even the most ardent P&T supporter is Jillette’s latest incarnation: novelist. Though he’s been performing the team’s offbeat-humor-and-magic show for 30 years and, with Teller, has written books including Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (Villard Books, 1990) and How To Play in Traffic (Berkley Publishing Group, 1997), he’s only just published his first novel, Sock (St. Martin’s Press).

But, true to Penn form, this is no ordinary work of fiction. The book’s narrator is Dickie, a sock monkey — yes, really — who belongs to an NYPD diver he calls the Little Fool, and the book’s structure is pure stream-of-consciousness adventure, peppered with pop-culture references and philosophical wit.

Q: The million-dollar question: why a sock monkey?

A: I had a sock monkey when I was a kid, and it’s looking at me right now. Although my sister informs me that it isn’t really the sock monkey that I had as a kid because she and my parents replaced them when I ripped them to pieces. So the sentimental attachment is entirely arbitrary. Actually, I didn’t choose to do a sock monkey; there was a book about sock monkeys, and I wrote the first chapter as a short story for that, and then a friend of mine — who’s mentioned at the end of the book, Nell — just really, really loved it and begged me to write a whole novel based on that chapter. Which I wasn’t sure I could do, and she was, so she kind of pushed me, and that’s why it ended up being a sock monkey.

Q: This is your first novel. How was the experience of writing it?

A: It was really strange. I’ve been writing for Penn & Teller for 30 years, and everything that I’ve written, which has been a lot of op-eds and three books with Penn & Teller, for the most part — there were exceptions to this, but the overwhelming majority of the stuff I’ve written has been first-person, me. So when I’m even telling stories with friends and stuff, or I do radio interviews or do [Howard] Stern or anything, if I’m telling stories, I keep them true. As I started writing this, I thought about when I was a kid, I read interviews with Randy Newman and David Bowie, and they talked a lot about how writing first-person that wasn’t you was this really liberating experience. So when I started writing this, I found — what I guess everybody who writes novels must realize instantly and is the real seduction of it — is that you get to tell the truth better. Many of the stories in the book are based on things that really happened, but I’m allowed to make it go the way I want it to. I just found that so amazing. It’s such an obvious thing, that in fiction you can make shit up. Most of my friends who’ve read it say that it’s more about me and more honest than the stuff that I’ve written that really is about me. It was a pretty cool experience, because I go on stage every night and say "I," and "I" always means Penn. It was pretty cool to have "I" mean a sock monkey. Although I have had friends call up and say, "I didn’t know the parole-officer story ended that way." And I go, "It didn’t, you nitwit. It’s fucking fiction."

Q: The book has a real stream-of-consciousness feel to it. Is that how it felt, writing it?

A: Oh, yeah. Everything else I’ve ever written, I have a really tight outline. This really was stream of consciousness. It seems I don’t have the willpower to not put a plot in; I always like, no matter how stream-of-consciousness stuff that I’m reading is, I like there to be some sort of plot. But yeah, it really felt that way. I have the perfect job; I like everything that I do. But it was really nice to do [something] as different as possible. There isn’t really even a paragraph of this that would fit in a Penn & Teller show, and I think that was part of the real attraction, not because I dislike doing anything in the Penn & Teller show, but just to break it up a little.

Q: The press materials for the book say, "Sock is not for everyone. It’s even not for every fan of Penn & Teller’s shows." It struck me as an odd way to promote a book. Why the disclaimer?

A: I have a friend, Renée French — she’s a fabulous cartoonist, and she does adult comics, like [adult] with an X. Then she also did one children’s book that was very, very successful. All of a sudden she had this problem with people who loved the kids’ book going to Amazon and doing a search for her name, and picking up the adult book and finding it, you know, inappropriate. She’s really, really proud of the stuff she did before, there’s no problem with that; it just is a very different style and she didn’t want people to be confused and misled.

The name of the book is Sock, and it has a sock monkey on the cover, and I really don’t want people thinking that this is something that’s a monologue out of Penn & Teller. The other thing is, as weird as this is to say, I have a job. The most important part of Sock to me is not that everybody reads it and I become a rich and famous author. The most important part of it is that the people that read it, like it. I would rather have fewer sales and go to the right people.