#ted heller

Day 2 of a bad toothache and I’m feeling a bit on the grumpy side.

The Passive Voice highlights an article from Amazon where novelist Ted Heller tried out self-publishing. He reported back that the experience was overwhelmingly not a good one. Based on…

“Boca Barbie was a nurse and worked long shifts at a large assisted-’living’ facility in Florida. Old men and women died on her regularly, and new ones would quickly fill their places, only to perish a few weeks or months later. A never-ending supply of the dying. Kiss was married, his oldest son suffered from severe autism, and his wife was on Zoloft; the Zoloft wasn’t working although it didn’t bother him that it killed any last trace of a sex drive she may have had. Kiss My Ace / Tim and Boca Barbie / Barbara sent hundreds of love poems to each other, some cutesy and corny, others serious, lovely, meaningful.” The incidental characters are the best part of Pocket Kings; Heller creates these side stories of people who use online gambling as a second chance, outlet, alter ego, and he for the most part treats them sympathetically, compassionately. This is a difficult thing to do well: giving characters like this, inessential to the plot, backstories with enough detail and pathos, and doing so without condescending or using them for comedy. There are other things that work less well: the gambling is, well, gambling, more interesting to do than to read about, as wins and losses turn into lists of figures, and card hands blend into each other; the main character’s resentment throughout his running commentary on the literary world (a two-time novelist with his third in agent limbo, angry and insulted by the success of others) moves quickly from caustic to a steady drip of bile. So it’s really nice that he gets the more difficult thing right.