Reviewed by Frederick Reimers

To lure customers to their rigged midway games, carnival operators must develop a good “call.” In Eyeing the Flash, a memoir of teenage years spent working those carnival games, Peter Fenton writes: “The midway was a noisy, colorful place, with plentiful distractions, so the first challenge an agent faced was enticing the mark to look his way.” As Fenton describes it, the call could be a compliment, a witticism, or even an insult—anything to grab attention. In that way, a call is much like the writer’s hook (a skill Fenton also knows well, having crafted leads for the tabloid The National Enquirer for 15 years). With his riveting first chapter—Fenton’s friend and boss catches him stealing $1,253—the author hooks us with his call.    

But even before Fenton dives into the first chapter, Eyeing the Flash is pretty alluring. To use another of the book’s metaphors, the “flash” are the prizes set to entice customers, from Chinese finger cuffs on up to color televisions (which are never distributed). In the case of the book, the flash is the promise of a glimpse into the seedy carnival life--its strange characters, itinerant adventures, and an insider’s look at just how those rigged games work. Everyone loves to be in on the scam.  

After the first enticing chapter, though, nearly a third of the story is spent on Fenton’s desultory childhood in a colorless Michigan town. In this section, the writing is clumsy and the dialogue overdone.  

However, when Fenton finally joins the carnival the summer after high school, things pick up. We meet the hoped-for seedy characters: Talking Tony, Philadelphia Phil (who is from Brooklyn) and Dinkie Barnes, whose German mail order bride leaves him for another carnie. Chief among them is Jackie Barron, the prodigal teenaged carnival boss who befriends Fenton and brings him into the profitable scam. Fenton, too, is interesting—a misfit with an almost autistic math talent and comically bad taste in clothing—sharkskin pants and red silk shirts. In addition, the hoped-for action ensues: Fenton learns to run the games and embarks on a quest to become the world’s youngest operator of the Flat Store, the midway’s top money-making game. The story culminates in the ultimate agent’s showdown –the Indiana Bust-out—wherein Fenton squares off against Jackie, his former friend and mentor, for stakes of $14,000. As if mirroring the protagonist’s growing skill, the writing here becomes more artful, the dialogue polished to a slick sheen befitting the con-men who speak it.

What keeps Eyeing the Flash on the level of a small-time carnival game though, is its weakness as a coming of age story. Great coming of age stories resonate because their characters learn things that propel them into a greater sense of life. While Fenton certainly endures life-altering experiences--learning to fleece marks, encountering sex and drinking, and even graduating to challenging his mentor—we get little sense of how those experiences inform him as an adult. The story ends abruptly, merely mentioning that he drops out of college. A longer view of the narrator’s life would have helped – especially because we know about Fenton’s National Enquirer career from the flap copy.

Ultimately, like those lured to play the midway games, we leave the book entertained, but disappointed, clutching a stuffed toy and wondering how it was, exactly, that we got taken.