In California, Jonathan Lethem Shows His Cards
“I feel like Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas,” the novelist Jonathan Lethem confided as we sat one recent evening at Henry’s Pub in Berkeley, California, which was booming with World Series cheer. This alarming allusion to the Martin Scorsese Mafia movie—with its main character forced into a covert existence after becoming a government witness—had nothing to do, as far as I could tell, with unsavory associates from Lethem’s childhood days in Brooklyn, New York, which he mined for popular novels like Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude.
Nor was he concerned that his most recent novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, might provoke backgammon’s most ardent fans with its not-always-flattering depiction of high rollers. “How terrified can one be of the backgammon community?” he wondered. Not much, probably. And considering how rarely backgammon trends on Twitter, that community might well embrace Lethem for endowing the game with sex appeal.
No, the reference to Liotta’s character living
