A Gambler's Anatomy

I've read almost all of Jonathan Lethem's novels and they are different from each other, and they are all different from just about any other novels. A detective with Tourette's Syndrome. A detective who is a kangaroo. A city stalked by a giant tiger. And now a novel about a professional backgammon player who has facial surgery. I'm pretty sure that's a first.

A Gambler's Anatomy is the story of Alexander Bruno, who makes his living fleecing rich men at backgammon. As the book begins he has just fled Singapore, after losing all his sponsor's money. He has a big match in Germany, and is way ahead when he starts losing. Is he being hustled? He ends up passing out and wakes up in a hospital, where he is told he has a tumor right behind his eyes. He's off to Berkeley, his hometown, for specialized surgery performed by a surgeon who likes to have Jimi Hendrix music pumped into the operating room. It's all being paid for by a high school acquaintance, who happens to be a horrible person who owns most of the businesses on a hip street, along with a hamburger joint (make that slider joint) where the cook philosophizes for those in line.

Suffice it to say that A Gambler's Anatomy is something like a shaggy dog story. I don't how Lethem works, and it seems like he's just making this up as he goes along, but it is nonetheless enjoyable. The plot, naturally, teeters a bit, but the prose he uses is often funny and/or beautiful, as this man who enjoys a somewhat teetering existence is brought down low and then regains some of his dignity.

"Bruno had for his entire life associated backgammon with candor, the dice not determining fate so much as revealing character," Lethem writes. Much is spoken of Bruno, but it seems the more is said the less one knows. Backgammon is an interesting choice of games, because unlike chess, it relies so much on luck. "Bruno had always loathed chess for its ironclad hierarchies and the bullying invulnerability of its champions, their belief that they stood outside fate." The trick to enjoying this novel is to realize that Bruno is not sympathetic in any way. He endures a lot of hardship in the book, such as basically having his face taken off and put back on, and being reduced to living off the largess of a man he despises, but we are interested nonetheless.

That other character is Keith Skolarsky, schoolmate of Bruno's who is described as a "toad of a man." "The American, who had a posture like a question mark, was dressed in layers of baggy, unwashed black polyester, too tight on his paunch, and a windbreaker over black jeans and worn running shoes—a costume exhumed from some Dungeons & Dragons basement." But he's rich, and for some reason pays for Bruno's expenses. He has a voluptuous girlfriend, who Bruno is drawn to. Skolarsky, it turns out, isn't exactly a humanitarian, and Bruno will end up feeling imprisoned by him. Lethem describes Skolarsky's office as "worse than ill-furnished and generic. It was like something an unmarried super might throw together at the back of a boiler room, a refuge whose walls investigators would later pry apart in search of hidden bodies."

In addition, there are other characters of note, such as Garris Plybon, the philosopher king of Kropotnik's, the slider joint which competes with Skolarsky's Zombie Burger, even though Skolarsky owns both of them, and Madchen, a German woman whom Bruno becomes enamored with--the first time he sees her she is wearing a zippered mask and nothing below the waist, serving sandwiches at the German backgammon player's house.

A Gambler's Anatomy is a wonder of imagination and turns of phrase, and though the plot doesn't really hang together and doesn't so much end as stop, I enjoyed it because I just dig Jonathan Lethem. If you do, too, you should enjoy it also.