Product Description

From one of America's most original and startlingly imaginative writers, a novel with "all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller."--The New York Times. A fireman and a gambler enter a poker game with two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card." What results is the product of a world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73274 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140154078
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Compulsive traveler Jim Nashe finances an epic poker match for a self-proclaimed jackpot winner. "In his lucid, captivating yarn, Auster quietly raises disturbing questions of servants and masters, of loyalty, freedom and the inexplicable urge to kill," said PW .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This insightful novel is a taut study of the self-contradictory mind living by chance while thinking it can get away with anything. Jim Nashe is a frivolous Boston fireman who needs music as a life crutch. His wife abandons him just before his father dies, leaving him money that he squanders aimlessly while driving around America. Near desperation, he meets a bitter young itinerant gambler, Jack ("Jackpot") Pozzi, who lures him into a losing poker game with two shady recluses, Flower and Stone, on their Pennsylvania estate. Nashe and Pozzi must retire their debt by building a stone wall on the premises: what this Herculean labor does to them is the novel's leitmotif. An interesting story, but some may object that the journalistic prose merely tells the story instead of showing it.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Less ambitious and satisfying than Auster's last two novels (In The Country of Last Things, Moon Palace), this equally improbable tale seems a bit hastily conceived, with too many blurry edges and no compelling center to keep things in focus. Jim Nashe, a 33-year-old Boston firefighter down on his luck, decides to give his life over to chance. In rapid order, his wife walks out on him and their two-year-old daughter; he inherits $200,000 from a father he hasn't seen in 30 years; he leaves his daughter with his sister in Minnesota; and he begins zigzagging across America in a brandnew Saab. With less than $20,000 left, the rambling Nashe picks up a hitchhiker ("A wiry little runt") named Jack "Jackpot" Pozzi - a traveling poker pro and fellow member of, as he calls it, "The International Brotherhood of Lost Dogs." Jim becomes partners with Jack, staking him in a match with two eccentric, lottery-winning millionaires in remote Pennsylvania. An "atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust" hovers over their strange estate, where one works on his visionary model of a city and the other houses a vast collection of historical ephemera ("a graveyard of shadows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness"). In their ultimate game of chance, the young partners lose all, and then some, becoming virtual slaves of the obnoxious rich men. Soon Jim and Jack are plunged into a world of backbreaking labor and arbitrary authority, until Jack is beaten senseless for trying to escape, and Jim becomes "crazy with loneliness," a prisoner in his "private hell." When Jim wins his final freedom, he celebrates with an unpredictable act of violence that affirms his assumption of control. But by this point, the novel has abandoned dramatic plausibility for some elusive, abstract notions about randomness and personal responsibility. Auster's in thrall to an idea here, and the more traditional aspects of narrative (plot, character, etc.) suffer as a consequence; without being redeemed by alternative ones. Despite some intrigue, a disappointing work. (Kirkus Reviews)

The road novel is as fine a US tradition as the road movie, springing from the spaciousness of that country, and Auster is a very fine example of this tradition. Both poet and novelist, he wraps up a story full of poker games and Grand Guignol eccentrics in a fine prose that makes even the most melodramatic elements seem plausible. This novel combines a whole series of stock themes (gambling, freedom, desperation, friendship) with an utterly serious look at human life. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

Smashing the instruments changes the music
I don't know if I necessarily enjoyed this book (or any Paul Auster book, for that matter). The enjoyment comes from the questions I ask myself after I've put the book down. It is not an enjoyable reading experience, but rather a contemplative one. In that regard, it is a highly successful piece of art.

The story appears to be relatively simple. One man goes driving. He meets another man on the road. The two of them meet some eccentric millionaires. The four men play poker. Then two men build a wall. It is almost nonsensical now that I look back on it. But the story's not really the thing (it never is in an Auster book). So don't go looking for closure, and don't expect easy answers. It's all just an excuse for some finely written meditations on the nature of fate and the restrictions of freedom.

Auster's writing style is enigmatic. There is a faux-coldness to it, appearing at first glance distant and reserved. Closer inspection, however, reveals much humanity and passion in his prose. I've always had suspicions that his surname is really an ingeniously calculated pseudonym, for any austerity in the writing is both sincere and ironic. That's a neat trick to pull off, and, to my mind, his greatest strength as a writer. In this example from his oeuvre, he gets the balance just right.

You all might think I'm fulla beans, but here goes....
First I saw the movie, and halfway through, it literally detonated in my head. It's a Freemasonic allegory! (And not exactly complimentary to Masonry, I might add, if I'm interpreting it correctly.) The masonic references are subtle (with the exception, of course, of the stone wall. 10,000 stones ain't exactly subtle but they tip you off to start looking elsewhere for clues.) I am not a Mason, but have read quite a bit about them, and our man Nashe (Wonder what Nagy means in Magyar?) is clearly a "traveling man", a man whose obligations (career,family) have fallen by the wayside (a favorite Auster motif), leaving him careening aimlessly, like a rogue pinball, from western city to western city who, as we meet him, is going "from the West to the East". (See the exchange between Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer on the train in "The Man Who Would Be King" if you don't believe me.) He picks up Pozzi, who has been "struck on the temple", just as Hiram Abiff was struck in the Masonic story of the events surrounding the building of the Temple of Solomon, and which is reenacted in ritual in the induction of every Master Mason. There are a number of other clever details such as the brand of champagne they drink with the hooker that just happens to be my old favorite "Veuve Cliquot". (It's too small to read on the film, but no other champagne has that distinctive orange label.) "Veuve" is French for Widow, and Masons often refer to each other as Sons of the Widow. The names of the two poker players, Flower and Stone, may refer to Rosicrucians and Freemasons, but their trip to France might refer to either Hugh De Payens and his pal's trip to see Bernard de Clairvoux (which kicked off the Templars, whom the Masons claim as ancestors), or perhaps Ben Franklin's (and friend?) trip to Paris where he was inducted into the French Lodge "Neuf Soeurs". They are many more (too many to mention here) and I still haven't cracked the whole thing (not being a Mason makes it a harder job), but the book fascinates me and I'll continue to dig. I've recently read Music of Chance, Moon Palace, and City of Glass, and will read the rest soon. This fellow is a joy to read, particularly for aficionados of the mystery genre, which he well knows how to seduce with his labyrinthine structures and metaphysical quandaries. He smacks of Miguel de Unamuno ("Niebla", "Fog" in English, I believe) and Jorge Luis Borges, the father of the metaphysical detective story (but whereas Borges' stories, much as I love them, are purely cerebral exercises, cold around the heart, and liberally sprinkled with red herrings as if to mock his readers, Auster's are anguished and emotionally involving), of the Pythagorean School (and its obsession with the relationship between music and mathematics) and the Priests of Heliopolis (whom I suspect they got it from), of drunken Phaeton and his wax wings and of the Minotaur in his Maze, of the poetry of Leonard Cohen and Lenny Bruce and Tony Curtis (who had his own brand of poetry, ask his women . I don't know if it's because this cat is my own age, or because I know his New York (before moving to Seattle), but I felt an instant kinship, like we'd read all the same books at some point.

NOTE TO THE AUTHOR:

If you read this, Mr. Auster, please drop me an email to either disabuse me of these notions or to confirm that I'm on the right track. In return, regardless of the answer, you have my word that I'll buy the rest of your books anyway, and that I won't abuse any email response, or ask you to autograph the books, or any such nonsense. I'm a stable, happily married chap with two kids and a small business, not a wacko or a literary groupie. Thanks for the ride, man, and keep 'em comin'!

When fate rests on the flip of a card........
Auster has a way with a certain type of character-one who is both on the fringe of both society and sanity both. They are not often very likeable or sympathetic characters, but they always are engrossing characters.

Jim Nash's veneer of sanity breaks when an unexpected windfall from the father he hates kicks out what little emotional support kept him on the straight and narrow and converts him into a wandering, nomadic drifter with his own transportation. In the midst of his journeys he meets Jack Pozzi, also a wanderer-sans transportation. Pozzi suckers Nash into an questionable gambling adventure that backfires, leaving them with a debt that leaves then essentially in a state of indentured servitude. The bulk of the story centers on how they cope with that condition.

The fundamentals of the story, as is so often the case with Auster, are , on reflection, faintly ridiculous. However, it is mood, character and fate that concern Auster, and his-and our-immersion into those topics render the absurdities of the actual story irrelevant.

I've read several Auster books and can't really say I've like any of them particularly, but they do fascinate me. I keep going back for more. The bottom line is what Auster does is ask questions about life and fate-in such a way that you are forced to think about them in your own terms. Auster does not supply answers-heck, not one of his books I've read can really be said to have an ending or resolution of any meaningful sort-but the way the questions are posed will haunt you-and keep you coming back for more.