The author of The Noble Hustle discusses writing his first memoir, playing in the 2011 World Series of Poker, and his religious love of beef jerky.
Times are tough for novelist Colson Whitehead in The Noble Hustle, his memoir about playing in the 2011 World Series of Poker. Not only is he drained after finishing a book under a tight deadline, he's going through a divorce and figuring out how to be a good dad under the circumstances. But, as Whitehead describes himself, he's never been the cheeriest guy. He's a proud citizen of the Republic of Anhedonia (a country he invented) — a place where no one can feel pleasure, a place for the gloomy and doomy.
A committed amateur player, Whitehead has one gambling superpower: As he says in the opening line of the book, "I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside." Taking his poker skills as far as they can go — and then some — he trains for and plays in the World Series of Poker, backed by Grantland. And he eats a lot of jerky.
The Noble Hustle is a Paper Lion-esque sports story, complete with ESPN cameras, training sequences, and encounters with greats like Matt Matros, Whitehead's friend and advisor and now three-time winner of the World Series of Poker. It is a travel memoir, in which Whitehead recounts bus rides into Atlantic City and describes the buffets and circulated air of casino after casino, and takes us on a time-traveling detour to a post-college cross-country road trip to Vegas. It is a treatise on our constant need for distraction, and the ridiculous things we do in the name of that particular American god — what Whitehead refers to as the "Leisure-Industrial Complex" — as we have fun seemingly together while remaining completely alone.
Finally, like all stories about hustle, it's about having the guts to show up. The noble hustle of the title isn't just poker alone; it's the grind of the writer's life, or life itself. This is a book for everyone from amateurs to professionals, or even those who have never played a hand of cards at all. It's for anyone who has ever dreamed of succeeding when success was always out of the question.
Through it all, Whitehead is skeptical yet open-minded, gloriously melancholic and self-loathing yet — just a tiny bit, or are we imagining this? — hopeful. Not to mention hilariously deadpan. In other words, he's the perfect guide through the wild world of poker, and after reading The Noble Hustle, you'll wish you could to join him at the table for a game or two.
I met Whitehead, author of Zone One, Sag Harbor, and other novels, at No. 7 in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where we discussed road trips in your early twenties, the importance of Twitter friendships, and, of course, jerky. Delicious, delicious jerky. The man who sat in front of me was anything but half-dead. His eyes were bright as he spoke of his two children (one a newborn), the new novel he's already working on, and the trials, tribulations, and fleeting rewards of participating in America's largest gambling event. His wit, though, was still as dry as the meat on the table.
Write things down and keep your notebooks.
Whitehead spoke about the process of writing about the past. In this case, it was a road trip he'd taken just after college with his friends Dan and Darren — Dan, who later founded a visual effects company that does the CGI for major movies, some of which were written and directed by Darren, who is indeed the Darren you're thinking of (Aronofsky). But take comfort, aimless twentysomethings: The three friends weren't always on the path to success.
“When you’re 21, you just want to write, and you want to direct, and you want to do animation, but you’re just totally unprepared to do anything. When I look back on it… I found my notebooks, which is where I got the quotes from. We were so clueless. We had no jobs, we had no money… [But] we bounced ideas off each other for the next, like, 10 years."
From The Noble Hustle: "Dan had escaped college with a degree in visual arts, was a cartoonist on route to becoming an animator. Darren was an anthro major who'd turned to film... I considered myself a writer but hadn't gotten much further than wearing black and smoking cigarettes... You can keep 'Write What You Know' — for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world's indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul."
BuzzFeed
Taking breaks is important, but so is taking opportunities.
"I generally take a year off in between books, just to decompress," he says. "At least, I’d hoped to do that, and then this came along, so [the book I was going to do] was put off until I was done with the poker, with the World Series. Because I was very tired, and it had been a long year-and-a-half of divorce, and handing my book in, and hustling to be a good dad, blah blah. (Laughs) I shouldn’t say 'blah blah' in interviews. So, the semester was ending, and the book was done. I was hoping to just kick back for the summer, and it really was the assignment of a lifetime. You can’t say no — it’s not going to happen again in between books.”
From The Noble Hustle: "...I wanted to rejoin society, do whatever it is that normal people do when they get together. Drink hormone-free, humanely slaughtered beer. Eat micro-chickens. Compare sadnesses, things of that sort.
"The editor had heard that I liked poker — what if they sent me to cover the World Series of Poker?
"No, I said. I did indeed like poker, although there was no way he could know it, was very fond of Las Vegas. But ten days in the desert, in the middle of July? I chap easily. And again, I wanted to give myself a break. In the past year I had devoted myself to the novel and to figuring out the rules of solo parenthood...
"Then the editor of the magazine asked, What if we staked you to play in the World Series and you wrote about that?
"I had no choice."
Via BuzzFeed
