The Texas Book Festival is this weekend; if you’re a regular reader of our books pages — and really, you should be — you already know that all the authors featured there this weekend are scheduled to attend. If you somehow missed those reviews, please acquaint yourself with Joyce Carol Oates, Bill Wittliff, Hector Tobar, Martin Amis, Matt Bai and Marlon James. (Some earlier reviews are linked here.)
And here’s a personal account of one more.
I picked up Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death pretty much by accident. Well, maybe not entirely by accident: It was Saturday morning, and I was on my way to get an oil change and realized I had left my backpack full of reading material at home. Is there anything more painful, short of actual, you know, pain, than having an hour to kill, a place to sit and no book to read? Luckily, I was going past the Richardson Public Library, which keeps its freshest books on display near the front, which meant I was able to find something and be on my way in mere minutes. The point of this paragraph, by the way, is to get you to thank a librarian.
I’d actually had a copy of The Noble Hustle sitting around since it came out earlier this year. But I had let it churn to the bottom of the nightstand pile. For one thing, I’m not a huge fan of any of the topics he discusses — poker, beef jerky or death, although I have actually stopped to buy beef jerky on the way home from the book festival. Which is probably best not discussed here.
Also, and I am about to get confessional here, I feel shameful when I read Colson Whitehead. No, it’s nothing like that. I actually enjoyed his last two books, Sag Harbor (interview here) and Zone One (reviewed here). And I think that his appearance at the 2011 festival was one of the funniest I have seen.
No, the shame comes from the fact that at that festival, I actually sat at the same dinner table with him, and talked about … nothing. Because I didn’t want to admit that at that point, I hadn’t read any of his work.
So it was maybe out of a sense of duty or guilt or the knowledge that it was not that thick of a book that when I saw his latest on the library shelf, I snatched it up. If it turned out to be a dud, at least I would be ready if we cross paths on Saturday. (He’s actually on a panel with my colleague Doug Swanson at 12:30 p.m.)
Let me get to the point and say: It is not a dud. Quite the opposite.
This is a brilliant book that is dangerously funny. Brilliant because Whitehead has managed to blend poker how-to, Vegas travel guide, cultural critique of American leisure and a memoir about midlife crisis in a way that should not possibly work, but does. Dangerous as in, strangers will wonder why you keep laughing out loud every time you turn the page.
This was a library book that I really was not planning to review, so I don’t have every great passage underlined, but there are so many you can pretty much flip to a random page and find one great line after another, starting with the first: “I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.”
Here are some other random samples:
“Ever said, ‘cute baby,’ about some newborn who’d found a portal between their Hell Dimension and our world? You may have a career in poker.”
“… I got a recommendation from an old girlfriend who’d become a physical trainer. I think she and I are in agreement that we were a crappy couple, both of us subprime dating quality, even by the low, low standards of early-’90s High Slackitude. It had been a terrible relationship, but I was grateful, for it prepared me for terrible relationships to come, so that I would not be surprised. The Matrix sequels, for example.”
“I packed. Arranged my affairs. Was there anyone I’d forgotten to disappoint before I took off? It’d be a while before I returned, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging.”
“Poker players and writers are always inside the game and also outside the game observing it. When I whipped out my notebook, no one blinked. I could have been recording bad beats, misplayed hands, or assembling a dossier on other players. No one cared what I scribbled. Like when you write a book.”
The narrative is centered on an assignment Whitehead accepted from Grantland to play in the World Series of Poker. I suppose it would be helpful to either have a passing interest in poker (I have played only two versions: Atari, which involved a paddle controller, and collegiate, which involved me losing my pizza money to a bunch of college friends) or to be able to relate to Whitehead’s jokes about anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure — and Whitehead’s home country. (“We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person. I would do it for my countrymen, the shut-ins, the doom-struck, the morbid of temperament, for all those who walk through life with poker faces 24/7 because they never learned any other way.”)
I will leave it to others to offer dispassionate, informed critique. Suffice it to say that finding this book was the equivalent of being dealt the exact card I needed to complete a straight flush, or a ticket out of Anhedonia, at least for the weekend.