Getting played
Alexander Bruno has a problem. He’s a world-class backgammon player, someone who plays private rooms in far-flung locales — Singapore, Berlin, anywhere where there’s a rich chump willing to wager thousands that he can get his checkers “home” before Bruno does his.
Handsome, dapper, given to tuxedos and professionally staked, Bruno has had an incredible run. But it’s all threatened by an ever-growing spot, or “blot,” in the middle of his vision, which has grown so pronounced he has trouble seeing the board.
It’s no accident that “blot” is also a backgammon term — referring to a checker that sits alone on a “point” (one of the 24 dagger-like triangles that organize the game), vulnerable to attack. Bruno, having reached his profession’s peak, is suddenly quite vulnerable himself — despite (or because of ) the fact that he’s telepathic.
Welcome to Jonathan Lethem’s 10th novel, “A Gambler’s Anatomy,” a circuitous adventure that skips from Singapore to Berlin before finally landing in Berkeley, with detours along the way that explore not only backgammon but also neurosurgery and, not least, the right way to cook those little burgers called sliders (it’s all about the onions).
New Yorker readers got a recent sneak peek of Lethem’s book, an excerpt that has Bruno bump into an old childhood friend (or frenemy), Keith Stolarsky, in a Singapore casino. It’s a good set piece, but for my money (which I wouldn’t risk a dime of against Bruno), the far better game lies elsewhere in the book, when Bruno faces challenging odds (starting with empty pockets) against a “potentially historic whale” — a wealthy mark — in Berlin.
Lethem’s depiction of the ebb and flow of fortune in that series of games, his meticulous depiction of how strategy and luck combine in a way that’s both similar to poker and far superior to it, will lead more than one reader to rummage around in the back of their closet (or local toy store) for a backgammon set.
Indeed, one of Lethem’s (many) achievements here is to make readers wonder why cards, and not backgammon, have been literature’s favorite game for centuries.
As Bruno muses: “Backgammon’s beauty was its candidness. In contrast to poker, there were no hidden cards, no bluff. Yet because of the dice, it was also unlike chess: No genius could foresee twelve or thirty moves in advance. Each backgammon position was its own absolute and present circumstance, fated to be revised, impossible to falsify.”
Even more striking, however, than Lethem’s rehabilitation of backgammon from rec-room staple to epic mental battlefield is his narration of the medical journey Bruno soon endures. Because that blot is no mere optical illusion but the byproduct of a vast tumor that’s wound its way into almost every nook and cranny behind Bruno’s face. It’s as though his face were a mask covering another, interior mask — which in turn covers some very dark things indeed.
Lethem’s narration of the operation starts about a third of the way into the book, and readers may sense that the research ran away with the story — what was supposed to be, say, a vivid two- to threepage description of what it’s like to saw someone’s face off, scoop out the goop and then put him back together couldn’t be corralled and wound up going for several chapters. I wouldn’t cut a word of it.
A mesmerizing, twisty, fearless account of an extraordinary 12-hour surgery that surveys anatomy, sociology, operating-room iPod playlists and the nature of consciousness, it feels like one of those sustained, how-are-they-doing-this?, single-camera, single-take scenes film directors sometimes attempt.
And as do the audiences of such films, readers here may find themselves holding their breath — both for Lethem and the surgeon, twin daredevils — wondering how, exactly, this is all going to turn out.
I won’t spoil it except to say that Berkeley, where Bruno lives as a kind of captive beneficiary of his old friend Stolarsky, doesn’t necessarily turn out to be the best place for him to convalesce. Stolarsky, an amateur backgammon devotee, turns out to be the dark force behind several exploitative (and lucrative) local businesses.
Bruno finds San Francisco suspect, too, “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 bus except untouchables, Walker Evans photographs retouched with murky color.”
San Francisco may have changed, but Lethem hasn’t; “A Gambler’s Anatomy” is as wild a ride as any of his previous novels. Backgammon knowledge isn’t essential — just a deep curiosity to discover what happens when you peel back someone’s mask and find another one, even more mysterious, staring back.