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breadandmushrooms's review
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.75
redeyedandhungry's review
3.0
Flawed, incredibly flawed in fact, but completely original and very well written. Lethem's prose manages to be both descriptive and compelling, something that is really lacking in a lot of other contemporary literary-fiction writers. If unconvential backgammon games and brain surgery sound appealing, dig in. I loved it.
callmeishmael's review
4.0
"Just when I think you couldn't be any dumber....you go and totally redeem yourself" that is how I felt about this book, it was well written and sometimes the word usage was a little much but it kept me interested. I wasn't connecting and felt a little depressed but then the last 10 pages....and boom. It ended the only way it could and it was wonderful.
rbccawrnr's review
1.0
Read only when I couldn’t sleep. Boring. All the female characters were treated as objects. I get the sense this guy thinks he’s deeper than he is.
morgakar's review
2.0
Very well-written, but extremely slow and consists of a pretty dull cast of characters.
ilovebooks7177's review
2.0
Not sure why he even has the right to spend so many pages analyzing all female characters' appearance in painstaking detail. Maybe this was meant to be some type of commentary, I don't know. Not a fun read though!
bnielsen214's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.0
A male fantasy with almost no plot. The female characters were awful. There was no resolution at the end and if the main character had flaws beyond feeling sorry for himself and short-sightedness (astonishing for a pro gambler) then I didn’t catch it.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug use
Minor: Abandonment and Drug abuse
shawnwhy's review
4.0
this is actually a really runa nd very strange ride, feels like a Dan CLowes, actualyl shares alot with his Death Ray book. a wierd chess game story with a origin story.
the_oakland_readers's review
3.0
1 star for taking place in Berkeley, 1 for the writing, 1 for generally being entertaining. This was kind of a “men’s book” if that makes any sense.
margaret_adams's review
A little more than a month before the book's release date, I read Lethem's "A Gentleman's Game" in The New Yorker, a short story that is essentially a standalone excerpt from "A Gambler's Anatomy." I guess a top-notch writer like Lethem can rate having a book promo as classy as the short fiction spot in The New Yorker, and I can't say he hasn't earned it: I've read four of his books in the last year and I've been consistently impressed by his writing acumen and genre-crossing flexibility. The writing in "A Gambler's Anatomy" was no exception. But, more so than in prior books, I found myself getting impatient with his consistently two-dimensional female characters, women so limited that it moved beyond "not a strength" and ranged into the territory of "distracting."
First: The writing is amazing. No one will contest that. The meditations on identity, masks, and defining flaws that could alternately kill you or be your sole source of meaning was all very good. My enjoyment of the book hit its zenith with the line in which Bruno, post-surgery, considers that "the wiry counterman's dissidence was like an epileptic upwelling within his body, possibly the result of pressure in some lobe. If you were Noah Behringer, the essential fact of anyone might be lopped out, leaving the patient to reconfigure around its absence." The dive into the industry language of both backgammon hustling and neurosurgery, not a combination I would have expected, was intriguing, compelling, and very effective.
All of that said, though, this too: the women of "A Gambler's Anatomy" all want to have sex with the narrator, or mother him, or both. No female character, with the exception of one angry lesbian cliche, escapes immediate sexual objectification followed by an equally expedient parsing into one of these two categories: does she want to sleep with him, or mother him? Because one of these, at least, is always true. Even within such a narrow range of options, the women are never not interested. The grounds that some of these conclusions hang on are at times so thin that I actually laughed out loud, something which I wish had been the author's intent; women, in the world of "A Gambler's Anatomy," are expressing sexual interest in men by a) talking to them, b) making jokes in their presence, and c) existing. The follow-through on this assumption is pretty fully realized. At one point in the second half of the book, a group of women at a dinner party in a man's apartment are casually labeled the man's harem, an unsubstantiated statement that, at this point in the world that Lethem has built, makes sense: every female character is sexually owned by someone here. To be fair, some of this phenomenon is part and parcel of the larger explication of how the narrator sees and perceives the world, but some of it, I'm starting to think, it just Lethem being unable to write female characters who are capable of being defined outside of their sexual relationships, actual or potential, with men.
I would have enjoyed reading this book a lot more if I could have gotten past this limited worldview, Lethem's own "blot."
I leave you with a classic list of male novelist jokes: http://the-toast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-jokes/
First: The writing is amazing. No one will contest that. The meditations on identity, masks, and defining flaws that could alternately kill you or be your sole source of meaning was all very good. My enjoyment of the book hit its zenith with the line in which Bruno, post-surgery, considers that "the wiry counterman's dissidence was like an epileptic upwelling within his body, possibly the result of pressure in some lobe. If you were Noah Behringer, the essential fact of anyone might be lopped out, leaving the patient to reconfigure around its absence." The dive into the industry language of both backgammon hustling and neurosurgery, not a combination I would have expected, was intriguing, compelling, and very effective.
All of that said, though, this too: the women of "A Gambler's Anatomy" all want to have sex with the narrator, or mother him, or both. No female character, with the exception of one angry lesbian cliche, escapes immediate sexual objectification followed by an equally expedient parsing into one of these two categories: does she want to sleep with him, or mother him? Because one of these, at least, is always true. Even within such a narrow range of options, the women are never not interested. The grounds that some of these conclusions hang on are at times so thin that I actually laughed out loud, something which I wish had been the author's intent; women, in the world of "A Gambler's Anatomy," are expressing sexual interest in men by a) talking to them, b) making jokes in their presence, and c) existing. The follow-through on this assumption is pretty fully realized. At one point in the second half of the book, a group of women at a dinner party in a man's apartment are casually labeled the man's harem, an unsubstantiated statement that, at this point in the world that Lethem has built, makes sense: every female character is sexually owned by someone here. To be fair, some of this phenomenon is part and parcel of the larger explication of how the narrator sees and perceives the world, but some of it, I'm starting to think, it just Lethem being unable to write female characters who are capable of being defined outside of their sexual relationships, actual or potential, with men.
I would have enjoyed reading this book a lot more if I could have gotten past this limited worldview, Lethem's own "blot."
I leave you with a classic list of male novelist jokes: http://the-toast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-jokes/