A losing streak

In backgammon, a blot is a single checker, sitting alone and unprotected. This is a sly title for this sly novel (which was published in the US as the more literal A Gambler’s Anatomy). The hero, Alexander Bruno, is a single, exposed man, and a professional backgammon player. He also suffers from an eye condition: there is a floating blank space in his line of vision, which means that he cannot see that which he looks directly at. Lastly, as a term drawn from the specific vocabulary of the game, the title suggests Lethem’s deep interest in the conventions and insider language of obsessions and professions.

As the novel opens, Alexander Bruno is on his way to play backgammon with a rich German industrialist in the outskirts of Berlin. On the ferry, he flirts with a German girl. Bruno is an attractive man, although his charms have somewhat fallen to ruin. He looks like Roger Moore ‘or the bass player from Duran Duran’, and his gambling skills, too, have recently diminished. At the industrialist’s house, the two men play, and drink, and after some minor Teutonic kinkiness involving dill sandwiches and a leather clad prostitute, Bruno collapses.

The book is structured around a series of games of backgammon. The second takes place in Singapore, and here Bruno plays against his old school friend Keith Stolarsky, who is now a millionaire property developer in Berkeley, California. Deep in debt to Stolarsky, and needing specialist medical care for the removal of the blot —which is described in an eye-watering surgical sequence — Bruno returns to Berkeley, where he was from. In California, the backgammon games become increasingly antic and absurd: a round of strip backgammon, and a version played on a grill with the mini hamburgers Americans call sliders in the place of checkers.