English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Good at Games

Lee Siegel. Love and Other Games of Chance. Viking, 2003. 418pp. Cloth, $27.95.

By Stephen Burn, Northern Michigan University 

            In 1797, at the end of a century that had seen the novel emerge as a distinct genre, the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica defined the form as being “above all” interested in “the nature of the affection called Love, and the consequences of indulging it.”  Although literary historians, such as Ian Watt, have argued that the development of the novel involved writers like Samuel Richardson stressing the genre’s opposition to “the cult of love and emotional release,” in Lee Siegel’s two recent novels, Love in a Dead Language (1999) and Love and Other Games of Chance (2003), the eighteenth-century roots of the form are revived as Siegel braids thematic explorations of love with his fascination for narrative.

Both of Siegel’s novels make dramatic use of eighteenth-century novelistic and historical materials.  In Love in a Dead Language, the basketball player, Leroy Lovelace shares his surname with the aristocratic libertine from Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), while the putative editor who presents the text, Anang Saighal, has written a dissertation on “Love as Game in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” and draws the reader’s attention to the parallels between Sterne’s novel and Siegel’s.   Similarly, in Love and Other Games of Chance, one subplot involves a character pretending to be the reincarnation of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India (1773-84).  This material from the prehistory of the modern novel is, however, invariably filtered through a narrative lens that recalls the work of later postmodernists.  Siegel was born in 1945, and although he had already created an admirably diverse body of work before he turned to writing fiction – including Vivisections (1973), a collection of drawings and poems; Sacred and Profane Love in Indian Traditions (1979), a scholarly study of Jayadeva’s twelfth-century poem, Gitagovinda; and City of Dreadful Night (1995), an idiosyncratic work (that Siegel classes as nonfiction) which follows his travels in search of horror stories in India – his novelistic debut has arrived relatively late in his writing career.  Perhaps because of this belatedness, his work does not fit easily with that of more famous American writers who were also establishing their reputations at the end of the century.  Both David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen published influential essays in the 1990s that critiqued the strands of postmodernism that have been dominant since the 1960s, but because Siegel’s emphasis is heavily on parody, unreliable narrators, and the playful elements of the text, his work can be more meaningfully understood in the critical context of writers of an earlier generation than Wallace and Franzen.

Siegel’s immediate affinities are with the writers whose literary innovations mapped the boundaries of postmodernism at mid-century, such as Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth.  Like Barth, who parodied the eighteenth-century novel in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), and claimed his “chiefest literary pleasure” was “to take a received melody – an old narrative poem, a classical myth, a shopworn literary convention . . . and, improvising like a jazzman within its constraints, reorchestrate it to present purpose,” Siegel takes the foundations of his work from established texts.  In Love in a Dead Language, for example, Siegel’s source text is ostensibly a translation of Vātsyāyana’s Kāmasūtra, but the narrative intertwined with the aborted translation, which traces Professor Leopold Roth’s infatuation with his student Lalita Gupta, is unmistakably rooted in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955).  And, in fact, in an interview following the release of Love in a Dead Language, Siegel explained that his earliest creative difficulties were located in negotiating the relationship of his novel to earlier works.  Siegel told Michelle Caswell: “I spent a good deal of time trying to imagine reading a book, a book that entertained me enormously, with the idea that, if I could imagine it clearly enough, I might be able to write a version of it down. Once I stopped imagining that the first line was ‘Call me Ishmael,’ I started writing [Love in a Dead Language].”

Having completed Love in a Dead Language, Siegel began a 198,000 word story that forms the centre of Love and Other Games of Chance with the first line: “Call me Isaac.”  The common origins of the two works in this sentence are revealing, because there are multiple connections between these novels about Love.  The central conceit of Love and Other Games of Chance is embedded in the earlier book, when Roth reflects that “reading, like love, is a game,” and both novels include pivotal trips to India, as well as a fictional version of Siegel, himself.  There is also some overlap in names between the two books: in the earlier novel, Leopold Abraham Roth has a son called Isaac, and in the later work Isaac’s father is called Abraham.  In a further twist, the Isaac of Love and Other Games of Chance has a child with Norabelle Roth, though it should be noted that, according to Siegel, the surname is not (as Tom LeClair suggested in a thoughtful review for the New York Times) an allusion to Philip Roth, but instead recalls Siegel’s mother, Noreen Roth.

The allusion to Melville in the opening line is appropriate because the frame story of Love and Other Games of Chance is based around the idea of receiving stories from previous generations. The novel begins with Lee Siegel’s mother telling him that his father is not the man who has brought him up (Dr. L.E. Roth, a Beverly Hills physician), but is, in fact, a showman named Isaac Schlossberg.  Although his mother believes that Isaac died in 1946, on top of Mount Everest, she gives Lee a Sears & Roebuck carton filled with papers that purport to be Isaac’s life story.  The box contains 100 sheets of folded paper covered with writing, a snakes and ladders gameboard, and a single die. The gameboard has 100 squares that relate to geographical locations (starting at the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, the board runs through the Wild West and the Mystic East, before it arrives at earth’s highest point, Mount Everest), and to the folded papers in the box. Each of these papers is numbered and, when read in order, relate the life and loves of Isaac Schlossberg, from his early years appearing in his father’s variety act through his various incarnations in India, Britain, Paris, and Russia. The 100 chapters of Isaac’s story are embedded within Lee’s story, and form the bulk of the book, but the two narratives are not isolated.  Instead the 100 chapters are designed to play off the frame tale narrated by Lee Siegel through several similarities, such as the fact that Isaac, like Siegel, has been lied to by his father about his past.

The formal interest of Siegel’s novel rests in the way the board’s grid relates to the 100 numbered chapters, which we are encouraged to treat as squares of the board that we can play on, as if they formed a game of snakes and ladders.  The game, Siegel explains, is intended:

to be played frivolously . . . according to tosses of the die. To play the game, it seems to me, is to become acquainted with the author in the same way we get to know a person in real life. We don’t meet people at birth and follow them chronologically, moving through each and every square with them . . . we come to know that person better when we hear of their past, when the serpents of their memory reveal what has gone on before.

This gameboard structure has similarities to the work of two writers that Siegel alludes to in the novel.  Firstly, references to “Nova Zembla” and “King Humbert” recall Nabokov, and the conceit of a life unfolding according to moves on a board game seems to owe something to Nabokov’s chess-suffused novel, The Defense (1964).  In another chess allusion, the last portion of the book is entitled “Endgame,” and Isaac’s efforts, in the face of a “bleak reality,” to convert his life to a board game has affinities with the game of ending that  Ham and Clov devise in Beckett’s Endgame (1957).  But, regardless of literary antecedents, the originality of the board device lies in the way Siegel has carefully interlaced the game’s grid of 100 squares with the text of his story.  Siegel has arranged the book so that numerical coincidences frequently occur in incidents from particular chapters, so, for example, in square and chapter eleven, Isaac is told about “Finkelman’s Industrial Fragrance No. 11.”  Similarly, as the board is composed of ten rows and ten columns, so Isaac’s life is framed by two obsessions that collapse into two tens: performance (notably the ten-in-one shows he takes part in), and love (Isaac falls in love with ten women).  At the same time, Siegel cleverly uses the board as an emotional map on which Isaac can locate himself.  So when he finds himself isolated in the Soviet Union in chapter eighty (a black square on the left margin of the board), a despairing Isaac can reflect that he is “in a dark square on the edge of the checkered board, repeatedly missing my turn.”

It is clear from this kind of careful construction that Siegel is interested in exploring the formal construction of the novel, but what is not clear is how seriously we are meant to take the conceit of the book as game.  I read this novel twice. Once, against Siegel’s advice, I read it as a linear text from page one to page four hundred and eighteen.  The second time, I played it according to the roll of a die but couldn’t help thinking of an argument that Isaac has with his first love, Angel in square eighteen.  In one of his skittish moods, Isaac tells Angel that snakes and ladders is “a stupid game for little kids . . . There’s no skill involved. It’s all just chance.”  Angel counters with a defense that paraphrases Siegel’s advice about the book, when she claims that “playing it is like living a life. It’s nothing more or less than luck.”  The problem with my second reading of the novel was not that Siegel’s structure was “a stupid game” but rather that my luck was too good.  I read only ten sections before I reached the empty oblivion of chapter 100.

This second reading was like only the shadowiest kind of life, and the engagement I had with the characters was slim and mysterious.  Regardless of any gain in verisimilitude, to proceed through the novel in this way is to risk missing too much of Siegel’s linguistic flexibility.  Although there are some weaknesses in Siegel’s wordplay (he’s too skillful and subtle a writer to have to rely on puns like the “Reverend Conwell,” or naming a region “Wanktonshire”), it is his mastery of language as much as the subtlety of the novel’s construction, that rewards the reader of Love and Other Games of Chance.  Siegel flaunted his talent for word play in the “Anagramic Charades” of Love in a Dead Language, and there is something similar in the later novel when Isaac finds himself playing a game with a man who wants to be paid a penny for every anagram he can make out of Isaac’s name.  Assuming that he’ll manage no more than five, Isaac agrees only to discover (to his horror) that the man’s verbal inventiveness produces a long list running from “So crass, I belch gas” to “Gosh, a scribe-class.”  Isaac ends up paying almost three pounds after only a minute has elapsed.

In this verbally inventive and sophisticated text, Siegel produces postmodern art from classic literary materials, and (given his fondness for allusions to eighteenth-century literature) as he worked on this book’s meditation on love he may have had in mind the section from volume six of Tristram Shandy, where the narrator protests that “I am not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is . . . so long as I can go on with my story intelligibly.”  Siegel is as fond of formal innovation as Sterne, but such is his interest in encyclopedic coverage of his subject that he does include a definition of love when he introduces the sideshow act, Madame Mnemosyne, who has memorized a dictionary.  Her final definition of love is “the affection of one created being to another hence arising,” but this book is equally preoccupied with the affection felt for a progenitor.  This affection is manifest on several levels, but the network of intertextual relations to the novel’s literary ancestors reveal a deep love of both reading and language.