The Education of a Poker Player

October 26, 2015
McManus (Positively Fifth Street) tracks the tribulations of boyhood with ironic humor in the seven linked stories that make up this portrait of a feisty young Catholic boy in 1960s suburban Illinois. Nine-year-old Vince Killeen searches for a sense of logic when religious mandates seem to contradict all evidence of how the world works in practice. The boy is a charmer, giving readers the lowdown on everything from deceptive communion to why it's not okay to look at nipples. As Vince grows older with each story, his initial dream of being the first Irish-American pope (to save his family from "millennia in Purgatory") becomes hard to fulfill given the presence of poker and Corvette backseat necking in these lively stories. This entertaining coming-of-age tale treads lightly on issues of guilt, opting instead to allow witty cultural references and a likable voice to carry the narrative. The title is catchy, but the most memorable scenes here don't involve much poker at all; the fun comes from discovering with Vince that sin (and life, thus far) can't always be measured in Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

Starred review from August 1, 2015
A boy copes with Catholicism, nuns, and such forbidden fruit as girls and gambling in a collection of closely related stories.In these seven probably autobiographical tales, McManus (Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, 2010, etc.) follows the thoughts and urges of Vincent Killeen as he ages from 9 to 17 in the 1950s and '60s. Vince is initially devout enough to feel he may have a "calling" to the priesthood, which would delight his grandmother and spare the entire family any time in purgatory, according to Catholic lore. He also appreciates baseball and language, tales of an older relative's hitch in the navy, the provocative lyrics of "Louie Louie," the sight of Laura Langan's bare legs two pews ahead of him at Sunday Mass, and the first inklings of his skill at poker. McManus' writing is deceptively artless: mundane details related in Vince's slowly maturing voice track the unexceptional life of a middle-class Irish-American Catholic family in a Chicago suburb, with the obligatory JFK portrait on the wall and the obliging production of numerous offspring. Yet the author gradually forms these common facets of simple people into a sharp, intimate portrait of an intelligent, inquiring mind embracing, then questioning, and inevitably pulling away from the beliefs and strictures of home life. McManus, a novelist and nonfiction writer, has played poker for high stakes in Las Vegas, and in Positively Fifth Street (2003), he wrote a classic about the game with riveting descriptions of poker hands. He achieves that again here in two sessions that have Vince facing very different opponents and challenges. The ironic and irreverent humor mined from Catholic arcana may bemuse the uninitiated, and anyone might question the author's impulse to catalog Vince's every erection. But then Catholics probably had little problem with the parallel challenges of Portnoy's Complaint.With this plainspoken, highly readable coming-of-age story, McManus adds another winning hand to a growing body of work on the hearts and souls lost to the game of poker.

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October 15, 2015
Despite its title, the is not another poker memoir by the author of Positively Fifth Street (2003); rather, it is a collection of seven McManus short stories about the coming-of-age of Vincent Killeen, a Catholic altar boy whose path to the priesthood in the late 1950s and early '60s is derailed by sex and poker. What John R. Powers did for Catholic boys on the South Side of Chicago in his classic memoir Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (1975), McManus does for their counterparts in suburban Chicago. Young Vincent begins as a very serious altar boy who works very hard at getting the details of his job right, like not allowing even a crumb from the consecrated Host to dribble from the mouths of the parishioners ( You wouldn't want Him getting stepped on or vacuumed out later by a janitor ). Slowly, though, the temptations offered by girls ( Even though concupiscent thoughts weren't mortals, they were dangerous, dangerous tinder ) and his poker-playing in-laws prove too great. This is well-trod ground, of course, but McManus enlivens the familiar material with zesty prose that goes beyond the jokes to capture that ever-melancholy transition from innocence to experience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)