MEMOIR OF A GAMBLER

by Jack Richardson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1979

Playwright Jack Richardson, an ex-philosophy major with a gift for elevated dialogue, spools out a long bolt of meditations on his career as a world-traveling gambler. No I-sold-the-family-furniture odyssey of addiction, this. When Richardson winds up in Macao inventing a hifalutin dialogue with the devil, Satan warns him that he will be ""left with a cold purse and bleeding bowels,"" but Jack replies that since his soul ""finds no true action for itself, it must make due with agitation."" (Yes, that's a pun on due.) Half the book takes place in Las Vegas as Richardson arrives with $17,000 or so, reviews his life between the stakes, and paints some of the weirder characters he's met around the tables. His addiction began, he relates, with a crush on his gambling grandfather who deserted his grandmother but who went to his grave adored by her and by Jack's mother; they revered his self-command and masculinity, and even paid for his burial. Jack's father was a humdrum cocktail pianist and no model for his ""extraordinary"" son. We follow young Jack's sexual forays with a retarded girl, his schooling in Munich (""nouns and verbs desperately compounding themselves as they strained to become definitions""), and close encounters with a homosexual, a fat, elderly card mechanic with smashed fingers, some beautiful babes and high-priced whores--all of which feeds his cloth-of-velvet musings and self-destructive ""prim estheticism."" Lots of soul-baring but also some sharp-focused characterizations of gambling folk--a mixed bag.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION