Reading: Positively Fifth Street

Positively Fifth Street is positively awful. That's easy, and I feel like I'm writing for US Weekly now, or People -- but seriously, guys: it sucks.

Some caveats, before I get too far into this:

1. I am not much of a poker fan, or, really, gambling of any kind. Unless it's gambling with my health -- especially in the face of delicious, delicious amounts of cheese.
   
2. I am not a heterosexual male who needs to prove his manliness.
   
3. I am not a heterosexual female married to a heterosexual male whom I let squander away buckets of money on my gambling addiction.
   
4. I have never killed a man by feeding him a lethal dose of MDMA and tar heroin, and then asphyxiating him with a washed-up hooker.

My friend Navin recommended that our book group read James McManus's novel about poker for our October discussion. I've been burned by books like this in the past, most recently the execrable Devil in the White City. In fact, the books could pass as fraternal twins -- both in cover design and crappy writing. But it was Navin's turn to pick, and I figured it couldn't be any worse than The Bone People, and then I realized that I've got to stop setting myself up for challenges like that.

I bought the book yesterday, and wrote Navin an email last night:

Navin:

The thing is, I could die. Crossing the street, a car might hit me; or, maybe, all the gravy I've ever eaten in my life could finally catch up with me in a heartbreaking heart attack of staggering proportions. The thing is, I could die and you wouldn't know how much I hate Hate HATE Positively Fifth Street.

I bought it today, and read it while Zach went to look at art he had to pay for. I was mildly put out/grossed out by the opening scene [Ed. note: The book opens with a description of the murder of Ted Binion by his ex-stripper ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend -- a scene that involves uncomfortable sounding sex and a corpse with the runs], but tacked it up to "true crime" reporting and figured I was being squeamish. When I found out that not only was it not really "true crime" reporting, but that it was instead the author's conjecture based on stuff he'd read -- that's when I got an inkling that I wasn't going to be a fan of this book.

I started keeping track of the positives and the negatives of the book by placing a plus sign or a minus sign next to the appropriate places.


- : Blurb on the cover from Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate. There are no good poets any more. All poets are idiots. Billy Collins is a poet. You've got the math degree; I won't insult your intelligence.

- : Blurb from Michiko Kakutani, reviewer for the New York Times. She hasn't been relevant, well, ever.

+ : Blurb from Ira Glass, host of This American Life. Ira Glass introduced me to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell. I like him. (I will try not to let his praise of this book influence my like in the future; however, he is totally on notice.)

- : Blurb from Jimmy Kimmel, who is only cool because he's schtupping Sarah Silverman -- the funniest woman in America.

+/- : Washington Post Book World blurb. I was telling Zach, "I think of the Post as my home paper, even though Washington has only been my home since 2000." When I buy a book, I always check to see what the Post had to say about it, and if it doesn't get a mention from the Post I take that as some kind of omen. This, of course, is retarded on my part: I've never had a satisfying time reading the Washington Post's Book World. Jonathan Yardley is literally 300 years old and fellated Atonement -- one of the most overrated books of the last 5 years; and Michael Dirda liked that goddamned Shadow of the Wind book, so you know my feelings about him.

+ : McManus wrote Out of the Blue [Ed. note: Good luck finding it.], a book I highly recommend to writers because of how fantastically real the dialogue is. There's a scene with some kindergartners doing something arts-n-craftsy, the way they do, and a boy asks for an "unraser." A little girl hands him one, and says, "E. It's E-raser. My name isn't Unlizabeth, you know."

- : Referring to the drug Ecstasy not as "X" or "MDMA," but instead as XTC -- the name of an entirely overrated English pop-band from the '70s and '80s.

- : Misuses the phrase "begs the question" when he really means "asks the question" or "raises the question."


I stopped that exercise on page 8.

The next thing I did was to strike out all the irrelevant passages. What makes a passage irrelevant? Anything that wasn't directly related to the poker competition or the murder.

I struck pages 1 - 11 because it has nothing to do with the actual murder, but is instead McManus's wet-dream of what the murder might have been. I next struck out his mini-dissertation on Jim Morrison's song "The End" both because I hate The Doors, but also because it, too, doesn't further the story at all. No one is impressed that you've seen Apocalypse Now.

I next struck most everything from page 21 - 31. There's a bit in there about poker that is relevant but most of it is about McManus -- and I don't care about McManus. In fact, at the top of page 25 I have written: "At this point, I hate McManus and his family." I'm not reading this book because I want to read about how a man justifies his gambling addiction to his weak-willed wife, or how McManus has adult children that he is still financially supporting, or the size of McManus's penis. (Seriously: I feel I've heard more of McManus's penis than I have my own at this point.) I'm reading the book primarily because you chose it; but after that, I am reading it because I am intrigued by the murder, and how it relates to poker. But McManus is not interesting enough to keep my attention. And I really, really, REALLY hate him.

He's too "macho." There's that awful passage about how his two girls were born because he had testosterone to spare due to some sporting event. [Ed. note: "Beatrice and Grace, as it happens, were both conceived during the Bulls' second threepeat." (26)] He wore a baseball cap to his wedding. He's a deeply uninteresting person, and the only reason that the crime stuff, too, isn't uninteresting is because it's difficult -- though, granted, not impossible -- to make a murder uninteresting.

I'm on page 78. On page 66 I scribbled "GIBBERISH" in all-caps because he described something to do with poker that made absolutely no sense because he hasn't spent enough time giving me the background I need.

I want to hurt this book. But I feel I could never hurt it in the same way that it has hurt me.

Mike

Navin wrote me back, kinder in his reply than I was in my opening salvo. "I'm actually surprised you got as far as p 78," he said. "Like I said, I was taking a risk here, picking a poker book for this group."

Not wanting to leave well enough alone, I decided that Navin still didn't get it. So, I embarked on another length salvo:

I've been thinking about Truman Capote -- there's a new movie about his life coming out that I'll probably end up seeing mostly because it's going to look at the social life of Capote, the Black & White Ball and all the socialites he'll eventually end up pissing off when he writes that graphically awful book that I can't think of -- wait, it's Answered Prayers.

Anyway, I'm thinking of Capote because I'm impressed that someone as narcissistic as he was would go to such lengths to keep himself out of In Cold Blood. There's a veiled reference to Capote at the end, when "a reporter" is mentioned. Otherwise, though, In Cold Blood is about the people directly involved.

It gets more interesting, of course, when you find out later that Capote was involved; and if there's a weakness in the book it might be that there were places where it might have been appropriate for Capote to reveal his involvement in the case but he doesn't. (E.g., that whole "Perry fucks Truman" business.)

Positively Fifth Street is thick with McManus. I know his wife's ring finger size (6). I know he obsesses about his penis. I know the kind of parent he is. And, from the looks of later passages, I'm going to learn even more about his family life. The thing is, though, McManus is simply not interesting enough as a human being -- let alone a competent writer or reporter [Ed. note: He's neither] -- to carry my interest.

Maybe it's the blog culture we live in, and the reality television epidemic, and the idea that everyone deserves to be known. Memoirs are written all the time be folks younger than I am, and there's this sense of "me me me me me" pervading the culture. Yet in a well-written book, I wouldn't know about McManus. I'd know about the murder trial; I'd know about the poker competition. The fact that he spends 3 pages telling me about spending money that he doesn't really have on a ring his wife doesn't really need is a waste of my time as a reader.

And my gripe in all this is not that it's a poker book. That's not what is making this difficult. I want to be clear about that. I watched the documentary When We Were Kings and loved it -- and I have no more interest in boxing than I have in heterosexual sex. The characters in that film are interesting and compelling, and the film does a fine job of explaining enough of what is going on to help keep my attention from wandering to "What the hell?"-sville.

The next time you have the book in hand, turn to page 66 and look at the second full paragraph. It starts, "But now comes the flop..."* Nothing in that section makes any sense at all. Not a bit. And it's not that I don't enjoy, get, or understand poker; instead, McManus has wasted valuable pages up to this point giving me information I don't need and not giving me a background into what "It's a seven, a jack, and a nine, and the seven and nine are both diamonds. This gives Hasan twelve outs twice" means.

We'll have to disagree about McManus's manliness. [Ed. note: Navin had said in a previous email, "I definitely think he's making fun of himself with the macho stuff. He comes across as actually bluffing, insecure about his own masculinity (especially when he starts playing against real poker players, later in the book). And I enjoy his discussion of himself, but I think we've had this sort of discussion before. I'm much more tolerant of that kind of first person thing than you."] I don't think he's making fun of his masculinity. I think he's dead serious. When he equates his wife Jennifer's passive-aggressive hiding of gambling addiction paraphernalia to his hiding pamphlets on aphids and breast cancer in places that are physically painful for her to discover (and how, exactly, are pests and breast cancer at all equal to his willingly spending money that they don't really have on poker?) -- he wants us to think he's in the right. [Ed. note: "At home I respond to her pop-up reminders by taping snippets from articles about the dangers of aphids, say, in the finger of her gardening gloves, or a piece about mammography in the lace of a bra cup, making sure the spiniest creases face in. (Glossy magazine stock makes for the wickedest corners, I've found.)" (37)]

I'm finishing this goddamned book. And then I'm sending it to the author with my scribbles and a demand for my $15.00 back.

Mike

For those who fell asleep/stopped reading/slipped into coma part way through, I'll just recap:

This was the worst book ever written in the history of words.

___________________________________

* "But now comes the flop. I can't look -- yet it turns out I can, even though I wish that I hadn't. It's a seven, a jack, and a nine, and the seven and nine are both diamonds. This gives Hasan twelve outs twice, since he has all twelve on both fourth street and fifth street: te nine other diamonds in the deck, the two other kings (the fourth having been counted among the diamonds), and the queen of hearts for a straight. John thumps the table with his fist, burns a card, turns over ... a jack. A red jack. But of hearts! Another thump, another burn -- Jesus Christ, get it over already [Ed. note: Seriously, McManus.]! When the last card turned up is the harmless six of spades, John calls out, 'Winner on Table 64!'" (66)

I can't tell you which of that was literal and which was metaphorical.