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| Read this book. 10-25-2006. |
| I just finished rereading one of my favorite books, Word Freak, by Stefan Fatsis. Part memoir, part safari guide, the book details Fatsis’s quest to become an expert Scrabble player. Understand that, here, “expert” has a very specific meaning: in the world of competitive Scrabble, players are rated with a system similar to that used in chess. Ratings points are gained or lost at National Scrabble Association-sanctioned tournaments, and while the cutoff for experts is officially a 1600 rating, the real benchmark is breaking 1700—a goal which Fatsis, a sports journalist and radio commentator, achieves in about two years. Along the way, he provides fascinating information about the game’s history and culture, as well as memorable portraits of its outstanding personalities: a battle-scarred Vietnam vet who turns to Scrabble for solace and structure; an aging Communist who was one of the world’s first experts; a pill-popping stand-up comedian who oscillates between brilliance and breakdown. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that people who devote their lives to a board game are an odd bunch. Part of what makes the book appealing is Fatsis’s voice. He’s an elegant writer, funny and self-effacing, and though he starts out as an anthropologist, he gets sucked in: charmingly, helplessly, and with total self-awareness that he’s becoming a weirdo. It’s hilarious. And his enthusiasm, his Everyman quality, makes it hard not to root for him. When he succeeds, you cheer. Another reason I love this book because it deals with two subjects dear to my heart: language and obsession. At the highest levels Scrabble is less a game of words than of numbers: calculating the probability that you’ll pull certain tiles out of the bag, for instance, or learning columns of words not for their meaning but for their utility on a board. Knowing that JNANA means “knowledge acquired through meditation” isn’t nearly as important as knowing that it’s a way to hook a J on the front end of NANA (“a grandmother”), which in turn is a front-end N-hook for ANA (“a collection of miscellaneous information about a particular subject”), which is a front-end A-hook for NA (“no; not”). A few top players actually know the definitions to all these words, but most don’t, simply memorizing long lists of letter-strings. It’s a bit like learning pi to twenty thousand places. That’s a strange way to look at language, and because I’m incapable of doing it—just thinking about it gives me a migraine, in fact—I will never be a great Scrabble player. I have a hard time remembering words without their definitions, and personally I wouldn’t want to have the former without the latter: it would feel to me like being given a beautiful car but no keys. I love English precisely because it’s so large and unwieldy and specific. I love that we have a word to describe the shape of a spatula (“spatulate”); that I can make a character scream, yell, shriek, shry, honk, cry, wail, screech, roar, or holler depending on my disposition and the demands of the scene I’m writing. In order to so, of course, I need to know what the hell I mean when I use a given word. At the same time, it’s interesting to read about people who see language as a set of rules and nothing more. In some ways, their command of words is deeper and more powerful than mine, not necessarily because of its scope but because it’s extremely flexible, able to accept new words easily and discard them when they are no longer permitted in the Scrabble lexicon. For instance, the Scrabble gods recently decided to admit two new two-letter words as acceptable in play: QI (“the vital force in Chinese thought that is inherent in all things”) and ZA (“a pizza”). Until then there were no two-letter words with Q or Z, which made it easy to stick your opponent with them at the end of the game, thereby gaining extra points. But now that that’s changed, Scrabble fanatics have quickly incorporated knowledge of the new words as well as their place in the strategy of the game. In short, the Scrabble mind readily grasps the notions that language is 1) arbitrary, 2) in constant flux, and 3) much huger than any one person will ever understand. As Fatsis notes, the most common reactions people have when they see a Scrabble game played by experts are to say either “That’s a word?” or “That’s not a word!” People have a hard time accepting the existence of words they don’t know. It’s almost as though they feel insulted by the suggestion. What makes the insult particularly acute, I think, is that we often consider language the defining feature of our humanity, what separates us from apes. So the idea that our ability to use language might be in some way deficient frightens us. Scrabble aficionados, however, don’t have the same resistance, at least not in my (admittedly limited) experience. To get good at the game you have to acknowledge the gaps in your vocabulary, and work hard to fill them in, whatever it takes. Seen this way, definitions appear more of a hindrance, extraneous information that serves only to clutter up your brain, when what you really need to do is retain the letter-patterns. There’s a sort of religious devotion to the task, a submission to the enormity of language that I find awe-inspiring, if not necessarily worthy of emulation. Learning pi might not be the best analogy, after all; memorizing the Bible or the Koran might come closer. Which leads me to the other reason I find Fatsis’s book so compelling: it is one of the best depictions of the nature of obsession. Obsession is a favorite theme of mine; obsessed characters recur in my work. I once wrote a play about Middleton Manigault, a 20th century painter who starved himself to death in an attempt to see colors invisible to the human eye. My play Fafrotskies is about the line between friendship and jealousy, which is really another way of saying obsession. Yet another play was about a man so obsessed with having new experiences that he sets about to eat another human being. Both Sunstroke and my forthcoming novel feature protagonists stuck in the past, obsessively rehashing what might have been. You might say that I’m obsessed with the idea of obsession. But that’s not really true. I am almost an obsessive personality—but not quite. And that’s why, I think, I write about obsession: because I am close enough to the addictive personality to understand, intellectually, how people fall over the edge, but too scared to ever go over it myself. So instead I stand atop the cliff, goggling at the true obsessives as they plummet into the abyss of single-mindedness. I am not alone in finding this interesting. Many of our great stories are, in one way or another, about love affairs gone wrong, and whether the object of that love is another person, an ideal, art, or God, there’s something irresistibly dramatic about watching people so hard-driven that they fly off the rails. From Kurt Cobain to Mozart, it’s a cliché, but it still works. Take the TV show 24. Jack Bauer wouldn’t be nearly as compelling a hero if he were well adjusted. He’s dramatic because he’s such a complete train wreck. The show is not just about Jack stopping terrorists; it’s about Jack stopping terrorists and nearly killing himself in the process, because he must succeed. It may seem fatuous to equate Mozart with Jack Bauer with GI Joel Sherman, the unemployed Scrabble expert who says that the game “validates [his] existence.” But I think the comparison holds: they all sacrifice their personal lives on the altar of excellence. They are all content to seem weird and inaccessible to the people around then. They are all figures to whom nothing matters except getting the job done. Few of us can handle that kind of pressure, or relate to that kind of drive—I know I can’t. But I think that, on some level, each of us wishes he could. I know I do. And that, ultimately, is why I think Word Freak is such a great book. Because Fatsis manages, somehow, to be both voyeur and monomaniac, objective observer and delirious acolyte, able to get inside an obsession but also able to resurface, like Orpheus descending to hell and back, bringing with him the most incredible visions, and relating them to us in the most dazzling way. |
