The Peekaboo Paradox response

Gene Weingarten's "The Peekaboo Paradox" is undoubtedly my favorite thing we've read so far this semester. Over eighteen printed pages, it consistently reinvents itself, sets up tantalizing cliffhangers then aptly rewards its audience's patience, and gives a privileged look into a somewhat tragic and inherently relatable story. "The Great Zucchini," as protagonist Eric Knauss (whose real name isn't revealed until halfway down the third printed page – a technique I quite liked) calls himself when hosting kids' parties, is a complex character whose bizarre life is fleshed out extremely well in the piece.

I won't recount plot details since that seems a bit superfluous, but I do want to call attention to the three completely separate phases that I was able to break the article into as I was reading. First, we meet the Great Zucchini, a do-no-wrong child entertainer whose simple, effective act has made him the toast of Washington, D.C. This section is as heartwarming as it is anything else, and serves to provide context for the life that we eventually get introduced to. The second phase shows the shambles of the real Eric Knauss' life. He lives in an empty apartment, he owes huge gambling debts, he doesn't know what he owes the IRS but he knows he isn't square with them, he's had his license suspended for forgetting to pay parking tickets – in a nutshell, he most certainly does not have his shit together. The third and final phase tries to find a reason for the ruins of his life. His mother is interviewed and speculates about her divorce from his father and an episode in which their neighbors were shot to death while he was home, but it's unclear what really made Eric the way he is, and he either doesn't know or isn't telling. Perhaps the final mini-chapter or postscript throws us back into the world of the Great Zucchini, and in a fashion fairly typical of these "unanswered questions" articles, opines that it doesn't really matter why his life is the way it is as long as he can keep doing his job so well.

Breaking the article up into those parts communicated the story as effectively I could imagine it being communicated, and the cliffhanger moments, such as when the writer tells us that Eric's mother told him what happened across the hall then waited several paragraphs to tell the readers what that was, only add to the piece's page-turning quality. The structure only serves to strengthen the already-great story, which is what any magazine article should do.