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| Stefan Fatsis is not — or, at least, was not, until a few years ago — a professional Scrabble player. Fatsis’s day job was, and still is, sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal. What began for Fatsis as a mere weekend amusement, playing “pick-up” Scrabble in New York’s Washington Square Park, turned into his own all-consuming obsession and, ultimately, this book. Word Freak is the chronicle of Fatsis’s personal immersion in the shadow world of hard-core Scrabble play: his growing obsession with the game as it is played at its highest level, his apprenticeship at the feet of the masters, his meteoric rise from novice to expert. The book is also an in-depth look at the competitive Scrabble subculture, a world of people and clubs and tournaments and listservs dedicated to the fiercely intense version of what most folks (“living-room players,” as they’re derisively called by the hard-cores) think of as an innocuous family diversion. Finally, Word Freak is (when Fatsis is at his best) a series of profiles of the Scrabble scene’s more colorful personalities, the true word freaks who devote their lives to memorizing word lists and letter-drawing probabilities and who make unself-conscious proclamations such as “Scrabble validates my existence.” It must be said that Fatsis does an entertaining, accurate and, above all, fair job of capturing the heartbreak, triumph, genius, and obsession promised by the book’s breathless subtitle. He’s obsessive as a researcher as well as a game-player and he has a fine ear for dialogue. Yet the degree of detail with which Fatsis documents his new obsession can be mind-numbing. As Fatsis acidly comments about the hardest of the Scrabble hard-cores he’s surrounded himself with, “of course, people who drink the Kool-Aid have little perspective.” Word Freak would have benefited from Fatsis cutting back on his own dosage — or from a non-Kool-Aid-drinking editor reining in his self-indulgence. — Reviewed by David Weiss |
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