Though I've been lurking/commenting, I haven't been posting about my own reading for a while (though I've read a bunch). Here's something.
I decided to catch up on DeLillo by reading his short story collection,
The Angel Esmeralda, and his post-9/11 short novel,
Falling Man. The first is strong, shows how skillful his writing can be, and is rewarding. At the same time the book lacks the overall impact of his best novels.
Falling Man is uneven. It opens strongly and has some great passages, but it doesn't seem to cohere. (Though maybe, as I suspect with
The Names, it would reveal more depth and complexity with rereading and study.) But what I wanted to talk about here, since we are, after all, a poker forum, is that the novel (to my surprise) had a recurrent poker theme.
Quote:
He showed his money in the poker room. The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to affect events. … the game had structure, guiding principles, sweet and easy interludes of dream logic when the player knows that the card he needs is the card that’s sure to fall.
*
Always, in the crucial instant ever repeated hand after hand, the choice of yes or no. Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no,
*
The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next. He wasn’t playing for the money. He was playing for the chips.
I especially liked this:
Quote:
Four good friends, cardplayers in a game that had lasted four or five decades, were buried in the configuration in which they’d been seated, invariably, at the card table, with two of the gravestones facing the other two, each player in his time-honored place.