Hollywood loves the mythology of gambling, tough guys sweating it out over poker, reckless losers with a dream losing it all at craps. It comes with a built-in arc of suspense, a contest made obvious. Literature has always had a tougher time with it — many a work of fiction includes a card-playing wastrel, but the career of a gambler has never yet been the core of a great novel. Perhaps that explains why Jonathan Lethem tries it out in A Gambler’s Anatomy. Perhaps he saw a way to crack the nut, and made a big bet.
Alexander Bruno, the itinerant adult son of a Northern California cult escapee, comes to us in this book already adept at his chosen game: backgammon. He is “approaching fifty” and “aware that his appeal was that of a ruined glamour.” His game skills are still very sharp, so sharp that he is mostly looking for marks, not true opponents. In the words of his gambling manager (Lethem seems to have invented the concept), most of the people Bruno plays with are “whales,” rich men who like the thrill of playing with a professional and don’t mind losing a few grand in the process.
We know that Bruno is running low on cash in the early pages of the novel. Something has happened “in Singapore.” We also know that he suddenly has a blot in his vision. He collapses, and a visit to the hospital reveals that the blot is evidence of a cancerous tumor wedged behind his eyes. Most surgeons could never remove it, Bruno is told, but there is one who could, one who just so happens to be located in San Francisco. That’s also where a frenemy — who brought Bruno low in Singapore — happens to live. “Northern California, where Bruno least wished to return,” the narrator intones.
The Saturday-matinee sound of that sentence is plainly intentional, of a piece with the mood Lethem maintains throughout A Gambler’s Anatomy. The men in this book are seedy archetypes, masterminds or bumblers. Everyone is a pawn for someone else. The world is two-dimensional, but it is self-consciously so, stylish but also stylized. For example, one of the book’s two women characters is literally named Mädchen, the German word for “maiden.” Just in case you’re wondering who will play the damsel in distress.
All of that is, of course, deliberate. Lethem is one of those writers who people often say “transcends” the genre elements of his work. That phrase doesn’t quite capture it, though, because Lethem is too fond of genre tropes to want to vault above them. His previous novels spanned the straightforward detective-novel-with-a-Tourette’s-twist Motherless Brooklyn and the bildungsroman-turned-superhero fable The Fortress of Solitude. In each of those books, Lethem wasn’t so much elevating the genre elements to literary status as proving that genre elements had literary value in and of themselves. He evidently loved comic books. He evidently loved detective novels. His books were love letters to those genres, not attempts to leave them behind.
A Gambler’s Anatomy, though, complicates the scheme, in part because one senses that Lethem has nowhere near the affection for gambling stories that he has for these other literary genres. There are some neat metafictional elements here, most significantly the fact that Bruno believes he can read the minds of others, a power that gamblers would surely kill for. But it is not clear to the reader that this is actually so, given how often he seems totally unaware of the ways in which others are manipulating him.
Those formal flashes make the book very entertaining to read. There are also surpassingly beautiful passages of prose, especially in the section about Bruno’s surgery. Lethem makes such evocative use of the medical terms for various parts of the face — the philtrum, the arachnoid tissue, the nasopharynx — that the reader hardly ends up caring that she doesn’t know what the words mean. The process, too, is so elegantly described that the necessary vagueness about the technical details never feels lost. “The face now began its slow journey to reassembly,” Lethem writes. “The displaced parts clamored for it, in their voiceless fashion.”
But what, in the end, is all of this about? After reading A Gambler’s Anatomy twice it’s hard to say what Lethem is hoping the reader will take away. There are no characters to love. There are no real philosophical questions posed. At the risk of using a cliché that Lethem himself is far above using, this book lacks any obvious heart. It is a tale of a man caught up in a scheme that is not his own making, a man who believes he has the power to know everything but doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. And while it’s fun to follow Bruno along, it’s fun to think about him and the small strange world he inhabits, it vanishes soon after reading, leaving only the tiniest trace of smoke. We are left looking to know a face, but find ourselves merely in awe of the surgeon who put it together.
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Sig Nordal 