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the text, “I don’t consider Scrabble an obsession in
a clinical sense: a disturbing preoccupation with an
unreasonable idea.I think of it as an obsession in the
colloquial sense, a compelling motivation.” In any
case, what writer doesn’t hope for the paid encouragement
of his obsessions?
Now, in the interests of propriety, an undertaking
of this sort must be considered a battle between the
myopia of deep immersion and the insight of distanced
perspective; Fatsis, admittedly unaccustomed to first
person narration, deftly straddled that tension throughout
his book.
“I’m a pretty standard-issue, mainstream newspaper
reporter,” he said. “The participatory thing always
struck me as a little bit of a conceit.” Fatsis described
his first book, Wild and Outside: How A Renegade
Minor League Revived The Spirit Of Baseball In
America’s Heartland, as a more traditional example of
‘fly-on-the-wall’ reporting. He considered it dishonest
to try that in Word Freak.
“The deeper I got into this,” he explained, “the more
it became about how I felt.” Fatsis wouldn’t like it if
people consider Word Freak a memoir. It’s not, but
here’s as close as he comes: “When I was nine, in 1972,
I calculated how old I would turn in 2000 but couldn’t
fathom that day arriving; it might not have seemed so
terrifying had I known I’d be playing a board game
full-time.” This disarming tone also happens to suit the
BUY Stefan Fatsis books online from and
author’s very thorough reporting, from the ‘Horatio
Alger story’ of Scrabble’s inventor, Alfred Butts, to the
fascinating variety of mnemonic systems by which the
best players have used Butts’ creation as a laboratory
for their mad science.
So, were Fatsis to recuse himself, the book would
lose a trustworthy guiding voice, not to mention a natural
narrative throughline; its minutiae would become
overwhelming, even boring; the subculture would
seem not to contain universal elements but instead appear
more rarified than before; and the whole enterprise
might start to feel like a titanic William Safire essay,
which, though enlightening, has begun to consume too
much of an otherwise useful Sunday.
Instead, Word Freak reads like an anticipated letter
from a sharp and funny friend, one who takes the question
“What’s new?” quite seriously, and always has a
good and true answer. Really, what more should we
expect from good nonfiction?
Fatsis is as he seems in the book: disposed to enthusiasm
(“I played UNILOBED!” he once interjected, recalling
the Reno tournament), or, to put it another way,
an especially sporting fellow. He even appreciates the
aesthetics of Scrabble, wherein lies a kind of abstract
expressionism – the non sequiturs, the shapes of words
themselves, the improbable consonance of consonants.
Could the meanings of “crwth” or “exergue” possibly
be any more useful or satisfying than their sheer, weird
214
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