Jonathan Lethem: "The Gambler's Anatomy"

Soooo...this is a great book.

Lethem is kind of a wunderkind, god among men in my humble and very reserved opinion.  He has written a veritable plethora (God I love that word) of excellent fiction.

• Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
• Amnesia Moon (1995)
• As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
• Girl in Landscape (1998)
• Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
• The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
• You Don't Love Me Yet (2007)
• Chronic City (2009)
• Dissident Gardens (2013)
• A Gambler's Anatomy (2016)

I confess that I have not read the first 4 books but I assure you that I will just to see how he game to his gifts of storytelling and commentary.  This book is just...powerful and creepy and compelling.  I was reading it while at the same time pre-reading Richard Dooling's new book which should come out late this year or early 2018.  it was nice to drop in and out of each. The thing about Lethem is no matter how mundane, provocative or tortured the subject matter... he amazes.  Not in the "look no hands!" type way of "look at me...LOOK AT ME!" prose but in a...wow...beautiful type way.  

So... a gambler?  Is there any more that needs to be said about this?  Can something more be gleaned from the subject that Dostoevsky or perhaps the movie "Rounders" didn't give me?  So, I was suspicious and perhaps even annoyed when I find out that the protagonists game of skill was...wait for it... BACKGAMMON!

I don't know if you have an opinion about backgammon.  It battles perhaps mahjong's for the sleepy, elitist factor but evidently... there is a lot more to it.  Additionally... evidently... a lot more to it.  Who new?  Who cares?  Well, you will.

Our main hero is a guy names Alex Bruno.  A rough and tumble quant from a single mom/addict/family in Oakland who hooks up with a gambling pimp of less than clear sexuality and they travel the world looking for whales who want the thrill of playing high stakes backgammon against the best in the world. 

it is vaguely interesting as a concept because it is so weird.  This is not a Vegas story.  This is not even "The Hangover" 2 or 3.  This is first class, brilliantly written literature... about backgammon.  Needless to say our hero is handsome, talented, leads a glamorous life and is deeply...deeply troubled.  In Thailand while fishing for a particularly evil whale he runs across and old high school classmate in the form of an ugly American traveling abroad with his somewhat hot (but way out of his league at first glance) girlfriend.  Some hi jinks ensue and we learn this guy, post high school blew up the gaming world and owns chucks of Oakland and has a fast food hamburger chain and a geeky gamer store and is worth...Trump like dollars (meaning hundreds of millions.  They part...oddly.

Our hero has been having some headaches.  He also has a gift of some minor mind reading which gives him something of an advantage.  he goes to Hamburg for his latest whale, meets a deeply troubled young lady and starts his game but collapses...has a seizure...goes to hospital... gets diagnosed with horrendous tumor and... loses everything.  Without giving too much a way there is another girl in Germany, a major surgery providing troubling results, a trip back to Oakland at the largess of his childhood acquaintance and a sick relationship/rivalry/employer/employee thing that keeps you reading.  The childhood friend is a beyond creepy, megalomaniac and is just...personally clueless evil to our protagonists blank slate.  Our hero is especially vulnerable post surgery and out of weird science experiment manipulation the childhood friend hooks him back up with the Hamburg girl for... oddness. The most intriguing character ends up being the Dude who cooks hamburgers at a local shop that competes with the other guys chain.  Things go down and down in Oakland where our hero continues his "losing streak" and it builds to a seriously ambiguous but exciting climax.

This book asks a lot of questions about money, aging, looks and life's big questions.  He does not provide the answers to the big questions but if you don't find yourself examining your own (or my own) mundane life a little more closely... well then you are just not paying attention.  Read this. It is just really well done and kind of fun...and creepy...and fun.

The Nix: Nathan Hill

Soooo…. We are well into the new year and I am just finishing the book I was reading when the year ended.  Not because it was hard to read but because I am an old man who only gets in 10-20 pages a night before the eyes just get too… heavy.  Very sad, brain plasticity among so many other things deteriorating.  Ah well.  

So this book was on a lot of short lists for best book of 2016 and it is with good reason:

http://ew.com/gallery/best-books-2016/the-20-best-books-of-2016

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28251002-the-nix

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book

Entertainment Weekly's #1 Book of the Year

A Washington Post 2016 Notable Book

A Slate Top Ten Book

I would concur with the gushing.  It is author Nathan Hill’s first novel and other than winning some prizes for his short stories he had not been on anyone’s radar.  This is a really ambitious first novel, essentially the story of a screwed up (really, really screwed up) mother son relationship and you spend a great deal of time dealing with the results of the dysfunction but more importantly he unravels the causes of it and at the same time pokes at, but does not really explore our current societal, political maelstrom with a blowhard hate speech candidate.

The main backstory in the novel unfolds during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago  and it is a pretty dark picture.  Walter Cronkite appears as a beleaguered hero of sorts, Hubert Humphrey cannot believe his crowning moment is unfolding amongst violence, pepper spray and the stink of blood and death from the convention which was close to the Chicago Stockyards.  In what I hope was an apocryphal scene the candidate is obsessively showering to get the stink off of him.  There is some pretty good commentary about police, policing and the specter of violence and the manipulation of these images and Alan Ginsberg makes a brief appearance.

But that is not the only story as our main protagonist, the son, a failing writer/college professor is dealing with an entitled co ed when his long estranged mother is arrested for terrorism (throwing a handful of pebbles at the Trumpian candidate).  After that...events begin to unfold with childhood nightmares and romances disclosed and ultimately explained.  In a portion of the novel we delve into the son’s excessive video game immersion as an adult and his on line friend Pwnage who is the mightiest of warriors in ElfQuest.  This gaming series and exploration of the characters relationships in real life and on line is...troubling.

With 50 pages left I was a little frustrated because I could not imagine how he would tie it up successfully but… he does.  He does not put a bow on it but ends it honestly with the characters working towards reconciliation of relationships as they try and first reconcile with themselves.  

I think this is the best modern literary fiction has to offer and it is worth the extended pages.  Read it.  You will see things in the narrative that resonate.