An extremely short (around 160 pages) and not quite satisfying farce about a billionaire, Guy Grand, who uses his vast wealth and free time to play elaborate and disgusting pranks on an unsuspecting public. It's a fun concept that never really achieves the sort of dizzying hilarity I would have liked. The idea of an enormous vat of heated sewage full of money that people must debase themselves to retrieve is quite amusing, sort of like an R-rated version of Double Dare. The novel is sporadically funny but doesn't really have a plot per se. Our hero(?) simply moves from one stunt to another until the story culminates with a cruise from hell on the eponymous Magic Christian, a luxury liner owned by Grand, which he uses as a seagoing torture chamber for the wealthy. I'm not sure what the point of it all is; maybe there's some social commentary that's been lost over the decades (I believe this was published in 1959 or 1960), but regardless, it's fun to imagine being a rich asshole like this, at least for a little while.