The Hustler - Walter Tevis

 

Almost despite himself, Walter Tevis was an amazingly successful writer whose novels have held up very well since his death to lung cancer thirty-nine years ago. I was very slow to pick up a Walter Tevis novel for the first time, but as it turns out, when I finally did (The Queen's Gambit), I already knew more about his books than I realized thanks to several of them having been made into major films. Including The Queen's Gambit, which was adapted into a hit series by Netflix in 2020, four Tevis novels have been filmed. The other three are The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, all of which are familiar to film buffs.

Tevis's hustler, who has come to be known as "Fast Eddie," is a young man who has been working his way across the country from pool hall to pool hall so that when he makes it to Chicago he will have enough money in his pocket to challenge the big boy pool hustlers there. Eddie wants as much as anything to make a reputation for himself, and he will be pleased to learn that his reputation, and expectation of his immanent arrival, precede him to the biggest pool halls in the city.

And that's where Eddie finds his own "white whale" waiting for him in the person of the almost grotesquely fat man who is acknowledged to be the best pool player in the country, one "Minnesota Fats." Fat the man may be, but something almost miraculous happens when he picks up a pool cue and strides toward the table:

"He stepped up to the table with short, quick little steps, stepping up to it sideways, bringing his cue up into position as he did so, so that he was holding his cue, standing sideways to the table, out across his great stomach, the left hand bridge already formed, the right hand holding the butt delicately, as a violinist holds his bow - gracefully but surely...And then Fats began moving around the table, making balls, all of his former ponderousness gone now, his motions like a ballet, the steps light, sure, and rehearsed."

Walter Tevis was an artist himself, and it's passages like this one that prove it to me. His novels are character-driven tales populated by flawed people whose deepest thoughts and motivations are all on full display for the reader to absorb and judge. The Hustler, while not exactly a coming-of-age novel for the young man in question, is one in which Fast Eddie finally figures out who he is and why he is that way. It's a bumpy ride, but with a lot of coaching along the way Eddie turns himself from a loser into a winner. What a shame it is too late.

This 1959 novel was followed, finally, by a 1984 sequel that would turn out to be Tevis's last book. In 1986, The Color of Money was made into a successful movie featuring Paul Newman in a reprisal of his role as Fast Eddie from The Hustler film, and co-starring Tom Cruise as a young pool player that Eddie wants to turn into a professional hustler.  

A Young Walter Tevis