The Cincinnati Kid is a young up-and-coming card player who decides to challenge the reigning champ, Lancey Hodges, in an underground poker game. Will he win or lose? Snore.
Richard Jessup’s 1963 novel The Cincinnati Kid is a rightfully forgotten pile of garbage about tedious people doing supposedly interesting things in an uninteresting narrative.
Jessup fails to bring to life the excitement of high stakes poker matches and, unless you’re familiar with five-card stud (I’m not - and the rules are unhelpfully printed at the end of the book rather than at the start), these sequences will be totally lost on you as to what any of it means. Better authors can write about subjects readers will be unfamiliar with but still make them understand the drama behind them, like Walter Tevis writing about pool or chess in The Hustler and The Queen’s Gambit; Jessup is nowhere close to Tevis’ level though, unfortunately.
Half the novel is about the Kid and his dreary country girlfriend Christian anyway. No idea why either because there’s no drama there whatsoever - I guess it’s to add pages to this slight novel that’s basically one scene. Some of the terminology is outdated - Jessup uses the term “rambling-gambling man” unironically, which only makes it seem more lame than it probably was at the time. The wafer-thin characters have stupid names like Pig, Ladyfingers and The Shooter. Dorks.
The big match between the Kid and Lancey is so underwhelming. I didn’t feel any tension in their encounter, they’re much too cordial with one another, exchanging the most pointless, boring dialogue you’ll ever read, stopping and starting before the anticlimax.
It looks like this rubbish got made into a Steve McQueen movie judging by the cover - definitely won’t be watching that! The Cincinnati Kid was the dullest drivel from start to finish. If you want to read a fun novel about card players, check out Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction instead.
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