Stefan Fatsis » Washington Post, August 12, 2001

Washington Post, August 12, 2001

By Molly McQuade

Surprisingly, one pleasure of reading this I-was-there journalistic account of total immersion in competitive Scrabble playing is also the main pleasure of reading most novels. For in Word Freak reporter Stefan Fatsis introduces us to various characters, all fervent professional Scrabble players, who are neither good nor evil but just strange enough to make excellent temporary companions for readers. More vividly outre{acute} than other people, his Scrabble contenders live for days in our heads, although we know that Fatsis, unlike a novelist, did not invent them — he met them.

For example, consider Marlon. An angry youngish man from Baltimore’s black working class, Marlon can’t always muster bus fare for the necessary journeys to his out-of-town Scrabble tournaments, in which he competes for money prizes. He’s as legendary for his fits and starts of temperament as for his talent. Yet even when bad luck galls him, Marlon’s oddly folksy bile can charm, at least from a distance. That’s because, like an extraordinary character in a novel, he knows and obeys his own moral instincts; he’s a struggling idealist. And his resentful, obsessive craving for justice, in Scrabble or out of it, creates narrative suspense of a high order.

Obsessive craving is the implicit theme of Word Freak. The craving infuses Fatsis’s portraits of devoted players, victorious or pathetic, chronicled over a span of several years while the author himself grew steadily more preoccupied with the game as both a participant and an observer.

As obsessions go, Scrabble may appear clean and safe enough. But no obsession worthy of the name is unhazardous. And so it seems slightly inconsistent that Fatsis’s own proclaimed “obsession” with Scrabble is conveniently protected by his professional motives and his stable livelihood: Obsessed or not, he’s on assignment to write a book, claiming as his model the George Plimpton of Paper Lion. Fatsis’s goals as a writer prevent him from losing his mind to Scrabble, as he sees others doing. He doesn’t surrender his health to the game, as a true freak would, or suffer financial setbacks because of ascetic, unpaid, round-the-clock Scrabble study and practice (presumably his book advance supports him). Compared with the longtime Scrabble pros, he sacrifices little, and his comparative wholesomeness (never fully admitted in his narrative) limits his purview as our guide and their fellow traveler. He’s a nervously happy-go-lucky misfit on leave from the Wall Street Journal office, where he normally works as a sports reporter.

But Fatsis is also a winningly ingenuous host on an occasionally glib jaunt to a world ruled by words all too rarely heard in our own mundane conversations. For anyone beguiled by language, Scrabble be damned, these words will astonish, rearing their syllables in his storied Scrabble matches like the chartreuse hackles of an arcane dragon. For even everyday mainstays of the Scrabble lexicon seem anything but ordinary to the average newcomer or amateur. Instead, the words that expert players sometimes lean on come across as wild, pure exotica: hoo, jimp, iotacisms, poove, blungers, saladang.

Alfred Butts, the game’s American inventor, noted that “Scrabble should improve the vocabulary.” Still, as Fatsis reflects during one of his frequent Scrabble cram sessions dedicated to strengthening his word knowledge, “What I don’t do [when learning new words] is write down the definitions, which could help, and might be interesting. But definitions, for the limited purpose of playing Scrabble, don’t matter. One could even argue that the words really aren’t words at all. They are strips of letters, dancing across the board, an array of lines and arcs and circles.” As Fatsis notes, “To play competitive Scrabble, one has to . . . accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility.”

An irony of the book not fully considered by the author is his apparent decision to restrict his own working vocabulary in these pages to a conventionally modest array of commonplace nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Of course, it might have been unwise to import wholesale his mounting Scrabble cargo of linguistic novelties into this narrative. But a selective inclusion of items from that trove might well have been appropriately enriching and amusing for us — and for him. After all, verbal imagination counts for something in high-level Scrabble games. A playfully imaginative writer might have taken a worthwhile cue there when composing his own sentences.

Fatsis faults himself instead for messing up too much in his Scrabble matches: Ever ambitious, he rises in the pro ranks, but not fast or far enough to suit himself. Still, “I accept now that learning words could be a lifelong process,” he acknowledges. “I want to play until I don’t make mistakes anymore,” he adds guilelessly.

Even that sportsmanlike good attitude must pale, though, beside the fearlessly extremist rhyming manifesto of a New York City Scrabble veteran, quoted by Fatsis as an example of bona-fide word freakery. The vet in question, unabashed Roz Grossman, declares persuasively in her poem: “I hate to play Scrabble with people who babble. /My psyche gets balky when they become talky. /I hate to play Scrabble with people who dabble /In encyclopedias. /I think they are tedious. /I hate to play Scrabble with people who wabble [sic] /All over the board until they have scored. /But I love to play Scrabble with my kind of rabble.”

Washington Post, August 12, 2001

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