Amphibious Fiction

Jasun Horsley on A Gambler’s Anatomy and Jonathan Lethem’s Autopsy Scars

“One part of me tends to conform to expectations, and accepts a useful but hollow role in an ongoing charade that I don’t feel invested in; the other part of me is making this deep, fugitive, dissident investigation that’s doomed. And I can’t find the bridge between the two.”

—Jonathan Lethem

Autopsy Scars

From the first line of A Gambler’s Anatomy, the new Jonathan Lethem novel, the author’s presiding preoccupation is present, front and center: the writer’s blot. The blot is a literal blind spot, an area in the protagonist’s visual field where everything blurs and becomes undefined. It is whatever you need it to be.

Lethem’s novels are written in code. I’m afraid the only way to adequately represent the experience of reading them is to review them that way too, to mirror their cipherous nature as best I can, casual reader be damned. Lethem’s Muse is a mistress of metaphor. And since Lethem strives to be as faithful to her as he can be, he endeavors to translate her Transmission accurately as metaphor. This then leaves it to the reader to complete the novels that Lethem, in his fidelity, leaves unfinished. The truth is not in what the cipher reveals about the code, but what the act of decoding reveals about the one who is doing the decoding. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Lethem’s theme is revealed explicitly after Bruno (the telepathic gambler protagonist of the book) contemplates his inability to provide the doctors in a hospital with symptoms that would make his patient-status official among them. “And so it was as if he did not exist.” The absence of symptoms makes Bruno a non-person in the context of the hospital, where only a clear symptom is seen as a positive. This is the world in which Lethem’s literary avatars wander throughout all of his fiction, seeking a way to exist as something other than a negative assertion of symptomatic identity.

Bruno’s eventual diagnosis, the reason for his seizure at the gambling table, turns out to be another perfect metaphor on the question of identity: vasovagal, or when “one loses consciousness at the sight of one’s own blood.” When what’s inside and unseen emerges and is seen, when the unconscious becomes conscious, the “natural” reaction is to become unconscious. Black out: the power of denial.

A Gambler’s Anatomy is about denial of the deep. The Blot, Lack from As She Climbed Across the Table, Noteless’ holes and the chaldron from Chronic City: the prevailing metaphor of Lethemia is the all-consuming presence...