Gambler's Anatomy (Lethem) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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"…. This novel is a tragicomedy; it plays at its best like a Twilight Zone episode filmed by the Coen brothers…. 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.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


There are probably a dozen novelists whose new books, every one, I'm predisposed to read. Jonathan Lethem is one of them. I like his fundamental literary ratios—plot-to-pensées, comedy-to-tragedy—and the prose is a pleasure, lucid sentences that swerve and surprise without being show-offy…. Unlike The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City, both sprawling books that plainly aspired to be Great American Novels, [A Gambler's Anatomy] is middle-aged in the best sense: relaxed, happy to be its impeccable, focused, antic but Weltschmerz-y self, slightly old-fashioned but in no way "postmodern." Lethem has said that after ending his youthful sci-fi phase and becoming a certified big deal, he felt pressure to "'stay major!'…to only write books as long, sorrowful and wide-screen as The Fortress of Solitude," but that he chose instead to write "other kinds of books." A Gambler's Anatomy is the best so far of those other kinds of books.
Kurt Andersen - New York Times Book Review


In his new novel, he seems to be channeling (and, as usual, transforming) both Thomas Pynchon and Ian Fleming...in short, just another day in Lethemland, as strange and wondrous in its way as anyplace imagined by L. Frank Baum.
Chicago Tribune


A Gambler’s Anatomy will lead more than one reader to rummage around in the back of their closet (or local toy store) for a backgammon set…mesmerizing, twisty, fearless.
San Francisco Chronicle


[T]he zaniness in Lethem’s new novel is tangential rather than central, highlighting episodes, not imbuing the whole proceedings.... [The] outlandishness can be extremely funny.... [T]he most successful part of the novel [in Berkeley] is an effortless blend of comic hijinks and madcap tragedy...propelled by sharp description and slick dialogue.... Lethem serves up a punchy, stylish, relentlessly entertaining novel which, during quieter moments, asks us to consider whether we make our own luck and how best to deal with what life throws at us
Malcolm Forbes - Minneapolis Star Tribune


[P]leasantly bizarre.... Though inventive and well crafted, the novel neither fully endears its characters to the reader nor establishes narrative momentum, playing at themes and romantic entanglements that are expertly introduced but often under-explored and discarded.
Publishers Weekly


International backgammon hustler Bruno Alexander is down on his luck, perhaps owing to a blot distorting his vision.... Once more, National Book Critics Circle award winner Lethem makes the weird real, normal, and entertaining.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] romp in which history, both personal and collective, can't help but assert itself..... Lethem takes real pleasure in the language and writes with a sense of the absurd that illuminates his situations and his characters.... In this tragicomic novel, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.
Kirkus Reviews