Does she love me for my painkillers?

and it works, but there are more conventional ways of ensuring that your inventions leave an impression.) That one of them should cross the Atlantic to tend to Bruno after his operation can’t easily be explained, even when Lethem suggests that she’s an addict and only really after his painkillers. Some gaps are filled with hints that Bruno may be a dupe in someone else’s hustle; even so, there’s a feeling that Lethem reels you in only to leave you stranded in the labyrinth of his plot. A few loose ends are simply dropped: we meet Bruno’s long-estranged mother – a recurring Lethem trope – in flashback, but perhaps more often than the pay-off requires. This is a less sorrowful novel than Dissident Gardens, but even when Lethem plays it for laughs there is a sense that he’s mourning a lost (possibly illusory) America. Landing in the US, the expat Bruno notices “the array of posted warnings and admonitions surpassed any European port of call, or Singapore’s, or Abu Dhabi’s. He tried to recall whether the United States had worn its policestate ambitions so brazenly at his last return, but it was too long ago.” Post-Trump, the passage bites more than Lethem might have guessed. If The Blot feels like the work of a writer who hasn’t strained every sinew, it’s hard to blame him – he might need that strength for chronicles to come.

This comic novel about a professional gambler’s anxieties has topical bite, finds Anthony Cummins

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