Daryl Gregory Serves Up Psychics, Mobsters and Mid-’90s Malaise in Spoonbenders

Growing up as the child of famous parents doesn’t always prove the privileged joyride it might seem, as stacks of tell-all Hollywood memoirs reveal. It’s much the same for children of exceptionally gifted parents, even those who inherit their parents’ gifts, as Ethan Canin described with remarkable insight and acuity in A Doubters’ Almanac.
A Doubters’ Almanac recounts the rise and fall of a peerless talent and how the resulting wreckage tears apart a family. Daryl Gregory’s new novel Spoonbenders instead concerns itself almost exclusively with the fallout of their former fame. If that makes Spoonbenders sound like it leaves all the fun out of out-of-body experiences, ESP and predicting the future…well, much of the book does remain soberingly earth-bound, even during scenes of soaring astral projection. It’s only in the book’s final chapters, when old wreckage gives way to new carnage, that Spoonbenders takes flight as exhilarating, high-action drama.
Spoonbenders begins in the summer of 1995, more than 20 years after the Amazing Telemachus Family, an ascendant troupe of genuinely gifted psychics—mother, daughter and two sons—crashed and burned before a national TV audience on The Mike Douglas Show. “We could have been kings,” laments older son Frankie, one-time aspiring telekinesis prodigy, now a telephone technician and failed entrepreneur dangerously in debt to local gangsters.
Summer 1995 also finds 31-year-old daughter Irene painfully isolated from relationships by her ability to detect even the most well-meaning lie. As the book begins, her 14-year-old son Matty discovers his talent for astral travel and out-of-body experiences while masturbating in his cousin’s closet. (What Matty discovers he needs to do to achieve liftoff launches some of Spoonbenders’ funniest episodes.)
Frankie and Irene’s father, Teddy, an old-school con artist with murky old-time mob entanglements, has been a widower for 20 years. Yet he continues to receive letters from his wife, Maureen, once the world’s greatest psychic, who died not long after the Mike Douglas Show debacle.