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JONATHAN LETHEM: A GAMBLER’S ANATOMY Tuesday, October 18, 7 p.m., free Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill www.flyleafbooks.com
Game Theory
JONATHAN LETHEM’S A GAMBLER’S ANATOMY IS JUST YOUR EVERYDAY TALE OF A TELEPATHIC BACKGAMMON HUSTLER BY ZACK SMITH In the space of a game board or an all-night poker match, everything’s heightened, and nothing else matters. It’s like a world within a world. I’m always interested in pocket universes—the kind of desolate side of sensual reality.
Jonathan Lethem has one of the most eclectic literary careers around, ranging from science fiction to realism—and sometimes, both at once—and from long-form nonfiction to comic books. He’s netted numerous honors, including the MacArthur “genius” grant. His new novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, is the tale of a professional backgammon hustler who believes he’s developing telepathic powers as the result of a tumor growing on his face (you read that correctly). We spoke with Lethem about how these diverse strands came together into a novel, among others topics, such as how music informs his writing.
A Gambler’s Anatomy deals with a number of different topics—eye blots, backgammon, psychic powers. What was the initial inspiration for it? For me, there usually needs to be a convergence of several ideas. Motherless Brooklyn, for example, there’s no real native reason why Tourette’s and private detectives and Brooklyn should coexist in the same narrative. But for me, when there’s an intersection of things that are charged and provocative, it’s very exciting when they come together somewhere in the middle. I’d been thinking for a long time about writing a gambling story—it’s kind of a mode I dig, things like The Hustler or Don INDY: You’ve done a lot of Carpenter’s tales about pool work with music and literaplayers or the French film Bob ture, from You Don’t Love Me le flambeur. I always wanted to Yet to your 33 1/3 book and do my own version, but it wasn't your interviews with musiuntil I came across the fact that cians, most recently Keith there really are backgammon Richards. Do you feel learnJonathan Lethem hustlers that I had an angle. ing about rock and the creI had to learn to play backgamative process translates back PHOTO BY JERRY SCHATZBERG mon at a higher level than I ever into your creative writing? had, not because the reader would necessarJONATHAN LETHEM: The relationship ily know the difference, but so that I could between me and rock music is—and make feel some mastery of my subject. So I played sure you include the air quotes here—me hundreds of hours of online backgammon, “professionalizing” it, in a sense. I take this against machines who are designed to beat handful of assignments from Rolling Stone anyone, and sometimes real opponents hidand Billboard and other places, and have ing behind a database. I wasn't able to go these kind of enviable encounters with into some high-end private club and take on Dylan and James Brown. I got to go a litpeople for money, but I still did absorb quite tle more scholarly with the 33 1/3 Talking a bit of backgammon lore. Heads book. I’d also been reading about this kind of But these really are the adventures of a super-problematic deep-face surgical interlucky fan. Ninety-five percent of my relavention for a while. It reminded me of hortionship to music is that I’m a wallflower at ror stories I liked: the films Eyes Without a the party. I don’t play; I’m not a professional Face and Seconds. I was thinking about this, music writer. I’m basically a guy with 60,000 and wanted to write a story that had a horsongs on my iTunes, and sometimes I like rifying turn in the middle of it, this surgical to hang out with musicians and talk about sequence. music. The third part of this was I was living in
Berlin on sabbatical at the American Academy, and I realized I was so interested in writing about where I was, and it made me think about how I’d never written an expatriate story. My characters are often dispossessed, but I wanted to do a literal expatriation story, the sort of “ugly American abroad” mode. It’s a bit of a stew—a lot of ingredients. Yeah, I like my books to have a lot of surprises and turns and different textures in the mix. I suppose I’m more of a stew maker than a soufflé cook. Well, at least you had an excuse to get sucked into online games for hundreds of hours. The thing I like about games—and online games in some ways exaggerate this property—is that they’re an arena where time kind of disappears, where you go outside of life.
Tell us about the research you did for the book. I had to do a lot of research on the neurosurgery for sure. I used two real hospitals because I had to feel comfortable with that material. Otherwise, this was a relatively research-light book by design. I wanted to tell a tale this time—follow a character, tell a story, have a plot, just make a lot of stuff up. For the telepathic elements of the book, I was curious if you talked to the Rhine Research Center at Duke, which deals with psychic research. That’s cool! I didn’t know that was there. I might visit it while I’m in the area. I actually did almost no research for that part of the book. I’ve read stories with those elements, and to me they have more of a mythic or archetypal component. It was more this legacy of fictional treatments I was drawing on. Bruno doesn’t go into any real-world scientific testing, or even tell anyone that he believes he has this power. I was more thinking about sources in other stories like Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside or Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Twitter: @thezacksmith INDYweek.com | 10.12.16 | 27