My first Lethem book. While I'm new to his novels, I’ve read a number of articles that he's written as a cultural critic, much of which I liked. Lethem has the kind of boho background that I envied growing up––painter father, activist mother, raised in Brooklyn with front-row seats to the rise of punk rock and hip-hop, wide exposure to both high- and low-brow arts and culture––which informs his work, certainly in nonfiction, but also fiction, if this book is any indication.
What’s interesting to me about Lethem’s background is the “heel turn” he made early in life, abandoning the fast track towards a prestigious career in the visual arts to become a burnout working at Berkeley bookstores, initially writing pulpy science fiction and advocating for Philip K. Dick before it was cool (or maybe when it was actually cool). However, it seems like it’s the cultural fluency established in his youth that has allowed him to be the perfect guide to the Harper’s/Granta crowd as genre fiction has risen from the bargain bins to the cultural juggernaut (and dominant sales-driver) it is today. He’s your cool older cousin or uncle, not “the comic book guy.” To be a good translator, you need to best know the language of your target audience, I suppose.
Appropriately, A Gambler’s Anatomy (2016) is an odd duck, stylistically speaking. It certainly has enough literary fiction indicators––clean prose and clever observations, a mélange of fact and fiction, ringing dialogue and hip avoidance of cliché––but it is basically a body horror story, in the style of The Fly or, most closely, The Elephant Man. Somewhere out in Hollywoodland, there’s a bad B-movie variant of this novel circulating, but there are elements of the narrative that make it almost uniquely well-suited for a book, which was fun to see in action.
The premise isn’t too out there. The protagonist Alexander Bruno is a grizzled professional backgammon player, drifting from one smoky backroom to another, from Vegas to Singapore, utterly rootless. No friends, no family, no permanent residence, no real interests outside of the game, and at fifty has little to show for it, when a health issue combines with a losing streak to leave him penniless and alone. However, a chance encounter with a childhood acquaintance, who has since grown rich and powerful, allows him to pick himself up off the mean tiled streets of Berlin and slink back to Berkeley, the hometown he swore never to return to, to try and put the pieces of his life back together.
The premise could be a Lifetime movie, but here’s where Lethem really starts to turn the screw. Even in anything-goes “Berzerkeley,” things aren’t quite as they seem. How did he get sick? Why is his acquaintance, who he barely knew even back then, offering him a place to stay and paying for his medical bills? Are his neighbors and strangely recurring characters in his life spying on him, or is this a side effect of the medication or social isolation? Why did he have to leave home in the first place?
The conflicting internal thought processes are key to the dramatic tension, and the descriptions are expertly adjusting the balance of "I can't look" and "I can't stop looking" in the scenes that punctuate the major developments. This is played extremely well, and each set piece ends with a little bit that's unresolved, something that's implicitly promised to be addressed soon. Not too different from how you're supposed to catch the whales a gambler needs to play another day, I guess. There's a muted background sense of chaos and paranoia, despite the everyday familiarity at surface level. The characters whose thought processes you’re privy to are comprehensible, but those of the others are seemingly inscrutable, as impossible to control or understand as the dice that govern the board game. You get the feeling that you are descending into madness... or is that precisely the ruse?
Speaking of which, the characters in this book, major and minor, are a joy. Bruno himself is somewhat flat, but this allows him to play the straight man on the Island of Misfit Toys. My favorite is Garris, the irascible anarchist burger ("slider!") cook, who drops sardonic sayings and quotes Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin as effortlessly as he sears patties, making his living by working for “the man” in perhaps the most American venue possible. "The true anarchist in an oligarchical society lives as an unembarrassed, even brazen parasite on the corpus of wealth." The lines only get better from there.
Unexpectedly, A Gambler's Anatomy contains a rather deep meditation on identity. Nothing banging you over the head (seriously not a Lifetime movie, thank goodness) but when you've lost almost everything that gives your life meaning––love (or sex), career (or money), even revenge (or just a thumb in their eye) and honor (or pride)––or that you can even recognize as yourself, where can you find the will to continue? The answer given is one of the more interesting and subtle that I've seen.
An easy read, and especially fun if you have any familiarity with the real-world settings (Berlin, Singapore, Berkeley) or related premises (backgammon or gambling, surgery or carework, entry-level service jobs). At a meta-level, it's one of the best transplantations I've seen of "genre" fiction into the fat corpus of mainstream "literary" scene. Your cool older cousin has since moved out to the suburbs for a while now, but you can still trust him to play great music in the car.