THE HUSTLER (214 pp.)—Walter Tevis —Harper ($3.50).
If Hemingway had the passion for pool that he had for bullfighting, his hero might have been Eddie Felson. The poolroom was Eddie's world in whatever town he happened to be, and such moments of truth as he experienced boiled up behind the eight ball. He was a pool shark, although he hated to be called that; he thought of himself as a pool hustler, a town-to-town drifter who conned strangers into games, looked bad or only fair at first, then turned on his skill when the stakes were high enough to matter. Eddie had the skill and pride of a real pro.
The Hustler has its faults as a novel, but opens the door on a world that books have not yet made commonplace. With his first novel, Walter Tevis (who teaches writing at the University of Kentucky) joins the company of such authors as
Dorothy Baker, whose Young Man with a Horn (TIME, June 6, 1938) looked steadily at a great jazzman, and Edward Hoagland, who lighted up the life of the circus in Cat Man (TIME, Jan. 16, 1956). They too were first novels, and they too dealt with character in unfamiliar surroundings.
A Born Loser. For Author Tevis a poolroom at 9 a.m. can seem like a "large church." But Eddie only knows the stale cigar and cigarette smoke, the massiveness of mahogany tables squatting impersonally, the lone hustler practicing shots. Hours may pass in a close game when the only life the hustler sees consists of shaded light on the brushed green cloth, the movement of balls elegantly cued, the sensuous dropping of globes into pockets. When it is over, win or lose, he wanders out into the streets that are usually slummy and unfriendly and back to a hotel room whose look and cost closely reflect his recent successes or failures.
The story picks up Eddie at the point where he has become so good a hustler that only the biggest man in pool stands between him and the top. Minnesota Fats makes his headquarters at Bennington's in Chicago. In Eddie's world, Fats's name is spoken with reverence. Huge, lardy and gross. Fats plays with the grace of a virtuoso. Eddie takes him on, and for 40 hours they match their delicate skills. At one point Eddie is $18,000 ahead, and the great Fats seems to have met his master. But it is Eddie who cracks, turns to the bottle for help, and takes the pool beating of his life because, as an onlooker tells him later, he is "a born loser."
More than Skill. Eddie begins to hustle again because it is all he knows how to do. Then one night he outsmarts himself, wins too spectacularly, and the poolroom toughs take him to the privy and break his thumbs. His comeback is slow. At the end he has regained his skill and has also learned that skill is not enough, that in the clutches a man's inner resources may be more important than a missed shot.
The moral of The Hustler is obviously sententious, the love story is a cliche, and Author Tevis' writing is sometimes too painfully exact. What remains is a succession of scenes in which a smoky, seedy world becomes sharply alive, and where crises are intense even though the scene is grubby and the game is only pool.