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.

Bright Precious Days

 

"I try so hard, just to fill your cup.  I try so hard just to fill it up."-Del Fuegos "I Still Want You" (1985)

Soooo...summer reading.  You never know how much you are going to get read.  You never know the quality of what you will get read and you never know how it is going end… until Labor day.  So it was a pretty good summer. Sweetbitter, The Fixers, Nobody's Fool… all had their merits but I ended with Jay Mc Inerney’s “Bright Precious Days”.  

Mc Inerney is like an old annoying friend. ”Bright Lights Big City” and “Ransom” grabbed me 30 years ago and I was fascinated. Here was the new brilliance.  Along with Bret Easton Ellis here were the cool young talents that should carry my generation.  Our Faulkner, our Hemingway, our...disappointment.  Because that is what they kind of ended up as.  Easton Ellis burned out fabulously and literally “shot his wad” with “American Psycho” and Easton Ellis, like an unprofitable John Grisham, just kept writing the same book, with the same cadence and the same “look no hands” writing style.

Mc Inerney is a great writer but his “Bright Lights” tale has been done and following the career of an aging, editor, failed author, book/wine/food snob got really annoying with this book. Every character was deeply and uninterestingly flawed.  Each character was and is relentlessly unfaithful to their spouses, their partners and ultimately themselves and it is all justified because they were the movers and shakers brave enough to go to Manhattan and burn bright, and burn out.  But unfortunately in “Bright Precious Days” some of these people, most of them in fact have now lived to middle age. And that is too bad.

The book is set in a period prior to the “Great Recession” as we like to think of it, and culminates in the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  Russell and Corinne… bright, promising and full of energy and intelligence are exhausted, raising two privileged id sweet kids, whose actual mother is Corrine’s sister.  There are parties and fundraisers filled with drama and betrayal and always booze and sometimes drug.  There is a literary bad boy whose death is telegraphed so painfully that half way through I told my daughter, “there is something sad about seeing a character marked for death halfway into the book,  and then continuing to read about their exploits know it will end poorly for them.”

A strong message of the book...not everyone handles success and money well… and drugs are bad.  About marital infidelity… I would like to say the book is more nuanced but that is too kind to the book.  Cheating on your wife is just something which happens and it is ok and it is ok doing it many times, sometimes in long term relationships, sometimes one and done… but it seems to always be OK.  It seems off putting being at the same age as the characters in the book and taking this as the “lesson” of life.

The book was difficult to complete because none of the characters are likable.  You can root for no one.  They all live in gilded cages of their own making and Mc Inerney cannot resist hitting tonelessly, every trope of NYC literati/money/vacuous bullshit along the way.  I know he writes about wine (although I have not read his wine books) but I really don't need to be bopped on the nose with great labels that they are sucking down...I get it.  I was grateful that apparently no one had invented the Sous Vide method at that time or we would have seen Russell cooking something for a dinner party with it or preparing for one of their annual parties up at their rental in the Hamptons.  I mean, seriously… I love reading The New Yorker but you cannot necessarily write a book for the best seller lists based on living The New Yorker for 30 plus years.  But perhaps that is the point.  The book is written for those who have gone there and lived “the dream” and for those in flyover country who still dream of it.

Once again, we get it, Manhattan is awesome….

And hard…

And it tests you…

And sucks the life out of you….

And is too expensive to be survivable…

But there is no simply no other way a seriously creative person could live their life.  For God’s sake Russell and Corrine met at Brown.

Reading the book as these people stumble through their alternately brilliant and horrible lives the only thing i could think of is that they needed to get to church and reflect a little on their lives.  Even when they are doing good in their charities it tends to be to serve their egos or to fill the vast holes created in the tragedies of their lives.

In the end they pull up from everyone dying in the crash preceding the great recession, but not by much.  Dreams have been reigned in, relationships recalibrated and in the end the book ends up being about the resiliency of imperfect marriages and imperfect people.  I look forward to all of their retirements in south Florida in “The Bright Twilight of Their Days”.  I pray that he doesn't serve up these people living another 20 years.