Put it down to vagaries of personal taste but I had no interest in the spelling bee documentary Spellbound though was excited by the idea of Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (2001). Maybe I just didn’t want to watch a film about kids no matter how human the interest or maybe the book just promised more substance.
In any case the book was something of a disappointment so maybe I should check out the film in case my mind has led me astray on that as well. Word Freak just shows too much the work of a journeyman sports journalist (except maybe for concision: it runs at least 60-70 pages too long). I’ll admit that probably the play-by-play descriptions just will never interest me but otherwise there’s not much from the title in the book. “Heartbreak” pretty conventional, “triumph” pretty much just winning a Scrabble game, not the slightest trace of “genius” but there is admittedly a whopping lot of “obsession.” Maybe a third of the way through it becomes apparent that Fatsis has chosen the obsessive, dysfunctional characters for their color (that journalist eye) and ignored the bulk of Scrabble players. Towards the end he even admits this and includes a brief interview with three women players that’s almost condenscending (he won’t come out and say there are so few competitive women players because of biology but that’s what he’s tiptoeing around) and perhaps intended to make up for some quasi-misogynist remarks earlier.
There are other issues. The front cover quote from the Los Angeles Times promises it “dances between memoir and reportage” (like that’s supposed to attract readers: “Hey honey, here’s one that hasn’t settled into solid memoir. Let’s get it.”). And much of the book is indeed Fatsis trying to become a champion Scrabble player as judged by the official rankings. But he reveals way too little of himself to be effective as memoir and is just too pedestrian a writer for the sort of craziness or insight or detachment that’s needed. Clip out a few sentences and Word Freak could pretty much have been written by anybody, something that couldn’t be said for other subcultural trawls like, say, Jeff Greenwald’s Future Perfect : How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic.
The problem with writing a review in this fashion is that it gives the impression that the book is worthless which is not the case. Word Freak is fairly entertaining; I just expected something more substantial. Moving back to taste, most interesting to me were the sections on how various players broke down and analyzed the game, figuring out methods and strategies to maximize scores, creating word lists, arguing about acceptable usages, etc. And so it goes.