Walter Tevis
7 Nov 2011
I recently finished two books by Walter Tevis, who is probably most famous for writing ‘The Hustler’, turned into a Paul Newman star vehicle in the early 60s (I haven’t saw it).
Tevis is also famous for writing ‘The Man Who fell To Earth’ and he wrote a number of science fiction books. ‘The Man Who..’ was the first of the books I read and I was immediately taken by it, a fairly simple but captivating story of alienation, loneliness & alcoholism. I recommend it, but I made the mistake of trying to watch the Nic Roeg/David Bowie movie too soon after finishing it. they don’t stand up to comparison.
The other Tevis book was ‘Mockingbird’ which I loved even more than ‘The Man Who…’. Both books seemed quite similar to me, but that didn’t put me off. In fact, it made me like both more.
‘Mockingbird’ was a story of a far future where a declining, drugged population are looked after by robots. So far, so Wall-E. One man learns the lost art of reading & breaks out of his stupor, whilst the robot which looks after the rest of the population tries to have a ‘human life’ (wife, child etc) or kill itself.
A bit like Carson McCullers writing about music, I loved how Tevis writes about what reading means to us… pretty hard to find, this book, but I loved it.
Lastly, Here is the reason why i picked up those old books in the first place. It’s the track ‘Walter Tevis’ by my favourite band, The Nectarine No. 9…
‘Walter Tevis’
“hey mister gonna lift me over..”
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