Music of Chance

I think I might have mentioned this a few times before, but I bloody love Paul Auster.  Having said that, The Music of Chance isn’t his best book.  Of course, “not Paul Auster’s best book” is still actually quite a lot better than most people could hope to write and quite an enjoyable read.  It’s more like the middle bit of its immediate predecessor Moon Palace than any of his other works (the covers are even sort of similar)- more concerned with Middle America and the average Joe than New York or the life of a performer.

The novel is about Jim Nashe, a single father fireman (calm down ladies) who inherits a large amount of money from his long absent father.  Nashe has long since abandoned his daughter into his sister’s care, as it’s impossible to have a job while being a single parent, and instead of doing anything responsible with the money, he buys a nice car and dosses around America for a year until it’s all but gone.  It’s at this point he meets Jack Pozzi who encourages him to bet and (naturally) lose the remainder of his money in a game of poker against two hermit-like millionaires who have spent the last month learning how to win at poker.  Shockingly, it turns out that this loss was probably all just set up by them, because they have a wall that needs building and Nashe and Pozzi are the kind of suckers that look like they could build a wall.  What follows is quite a lot of wall building, revelations that manual labour is wonderful and being blue-collar is a true joy and a fair amount of things that would definitely count as spoilers.

The Music of Chance is a book that, as I mentioned earlier, I did enjoy.  But it’s also one that I can’t help but be a little sarcastic about.  The plot’s fairly simplistic and it’s incredibly obvious what’s going to happen as soon as Pozzi mentions the poker game.  I mean, who’d write a book about winning a few thousand dollars in a poker game?  And yes, the theme of chance runs through the entire thing quite nicely.  Messrs Flower and Stone are only millionaires because of chance; winning the lottery, Pozzi and Nashe only meet by chance.  Chance is, without a doubt, the driving force in the narrative.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t make for massively interesting characters.

I wasn’t mad keen on Nashe as a character.  He doesn’t make any sense.  I don’t personally know any firefighters, but I’ve seen them on reality TV (both British and American) and none of them were as well read as Nashe is.  When he and Pozzi are on their wall building mission they are provided with whatever entertainment they desire and Nashe plugs for books.  And high-brow books too.  He reads Dickens.  He enjoys Dickens.  Even I don’t enjoy Dickens.  I wasn’t aware people actually did.  I’m strongly of the opinion that people who say they like Dickens are lying to look smart.  It doesn’t make sense to me that someone stupid enough to fall for Flowers and Stone’s obvious “play poker with us” plot would gain any actual enjoyment from Our Mutual Friend. 

In all this is a good read.  If I’m honest, yes- I was slightly disappointed by it, but I think that’s because I’ve been waiting months to read this book.  It’s one of those ones that’s been sitting off to one side of my radar as I slowly accept that it’s just not available at my local library.  There is also the fact that the book features maybe two named women who feature in a grand total of about three scenes.  It’s all terrifically masculine.  Poker and most gambling, in fact, is one of those things that is unnecessarily gendered.  An (albeit) stereotypically female touch might have brought sense to proceedings and stopped the ridiculous poker game, and the entire book, in its tracks.

My net blog will be on Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.  Thankfully, I’ve already finished the book.