Jonathan Lethem’s 10th novel, “A Gambler’s Anatomy,” is about a backgammon hustler, “a weird sad gorgeous man” in late middle age who shuttles between casino V.I.P. rooms across Europe and Asia, relieving rich men of their pretensions and their money.
This hustler’s name is Alexander Bruno. He has high cheekbones and a ruinous glamour. “He’d been told he resembled Roger Moore,” Mr. Lethem writes, “or the bass player from Duran Duran.” In my mind, there’s some Chet Baker in Bruno as well. He’s almost blue and aching to get lost.
Mr. Lethem’s backgammon writing has a satisfying crunch. It’s witty and sexy, too. I’m not sure I’ve ever before read a love scene that begins with a woman crying out, “Double me, gammon me.”
As Bruno plays high-stakes competitions in cities like Singapore, the early parts of “A Gambler’s Anatomy” read like a caper narrative concocted by Elmore Leonard or David Mamet. You half expect the sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay to appear in a tuxedo, expounding on the history of dice.
But this novel quickly bends, like one of Uri Geller’s spoons, into stranger territory. Bruno, it happens, has psychic gifts; he can sometimes read minds. He’s been handed a death sentence. After he has a seizure during a high-stakes match, he learns he has an enormous and inoperable crablike tumor pressing on his face from the inside of his skull.
His very countenance is under duress. And as Mr. Lethem put it in his novel “You Don’t Love Me Yet” (2007), “You can’t be deep without a surface.”
Bruno returns to the Bay Area, where he grew up and vowed never to return, to undergo experimental surgery by a hippie doctor who plays Jimi Hendrix songs in the operating theater. The doctor dismantles Bruno’s eye sockets and opens the bones of his face, as if they were a door on a hinge, and spends hours sucking out the tumor.
The operation is a success, even if Bruno winds up looking, as one of his antagonists puts it, “like Frankenstein and his own monster, all stitched together.” Yet the operation has stolen something from him; a crucial element of his Bruno-hood has been crimped. This book will become an antic meditation on personality, and on masks, which Bruno begins to wear.
It’s when the novel returns to the Bay Area that it fully becomes a Jonathan Lethem production. That is, the author begins to pour many of his abiding concerns into it: radical politics, underground art, an interest in literary genre (here a loose-leaf tea blend of detective fiction and science fiction), misplaced memories, a missing mother.
We meet the usual array of characters with quirky Pynchonian surnames, ones you expect might be — but are not — anagrams: Garris Plybon, Madchen Abplanalp, Tira Harpaz. Among the book’s central characters are an anarchist burger flipper, a German dominatrix and a widely loathed Berkeley businessman who seems to be a mixture of Crazy Eddie, the electronics kingpin, and Maurice Conchis, the wealthy intellectual who plays mind games on the young protagonist of John Fowles’s 1965 novel, “The Magus.”
“A Gambler’s Anatomy” is a fluky novel, not among Mr. Lethem’s very best. Its themes are underdeveloped, and it moves in zigs and zags, like a squirrel in headlights.
It’s less fully realized than “Motherless Brooklyn” (1999), his ecstatic breakthrough novel, a detective tale narrated by a man with Tourette’s syndrome, or “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003), his streetwise, semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s and ’80s.
This novel is a tragicomedy; it plays at its best like a “Twilight Zone” episode filmed by the Coen brothers. At its worst, nothing is at stake — the characters are breezy ciphers.
Yet Mr. Lethem has intense gifts; nothing he writes is a waste of time. He lived for many years in the Bay Area as a young man; he was frequently employed as a clerk in Berkeley’s used bookstores. He has a fine sense of this place. Here is Bruno, heading into a city he has not seen in decades:
“San Francisco was a futuristic cartoon of the dozy, cozy city he recalled. The new place was alien, slick as Abu Dhabi in its top layer, with Bluetooth and Google Glass cyborgs strolling beneath glass towers. The underside was as gritty as Mumbai, with no one on the N-Judah streetcar except untouchables, Walker Evans photographs retouched with murky color.”
The prose in “A Gambler’s Anatomy” is nearly always this good, and Mr. Lethem has a touching sense of the lives of obsessive misfits. They’re his tribe.
In Bruno he has given us a knight errant, a casually chivalrous wanderer in search of his place on earth. He’s always under someone’s thumb, indebted in ways he can’t begin to understand. He tends to feel that he is the victim of “some obscure sting operation.” He’s no longer sure what freedom consists of.
The great thriller writer John D. MacDonald declared, in one of his Travis McGee novels, “If any two people could ever really get inside each other’s head, it would scare the pee out of both of them.”
Bruno has scanned the contents of other people’s heads. As a human, this has terrified him. As a gambler, it’s done him no good at all. But all losing streaks must come to an end.
A Gambler’s Anatomy
By Jonathan Lethem
289 pages. Doubleday. $27.95.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
No comments:
Post a Comment