The Gamesman by Barry Malzberg

Block, twenty-seven, will beat the Game.  He will emerge from its difficult network into triumph; he will pull from this dark lottery the one gleaming prize of connection.

On Sunday, November 10, the wife and I ventured into Washington, D.C.--the belly of the beast!--and I escaped back to the suburbs with my life, sanity and three new books, among them Barry Malzberg's The Gamesman, a 1975 paperback from Pocket Books.  We at MPorcius Fiction Log love Malzberg, and Joachim Boaz considers The Gamesman a favorite, so this was a welcome find.  Without further ado, let's delve into this novel of 22 chapters, 188 pages, large print and large margins that is dedicated to "Phillip K. Dick."

Compare page 13 of The Gamesman to page 13 of Garbage World by Charles Platt.
(Click to enlarge.)

The Gamesman starts with a bang and a whimper as the masked "Gamesman" (no "the" in the first chapter, interestingly), chronometer in hand, observes our narrator, Papa Joe Block, straddling a woman, endeavoring to penetrate her sexually.  Block seems to be alienated from his own body, telling us in the very first sentence of the book that he sometimes thinks of himself in the first person and sometimes in the third, which we readers soon find is reflected throughout the novel by irregular switches back and forth between first- and third-person narration.  The woman in question, and Gamesman, criticize Papa Joe Block severely when, unable to maintain rigidity, our hero ejaculates prematurely in the woman's hand as she is trying to guide him into her vagina.  This episode of sexual dysfunction is punctuated by asides in which the narrator laments that he will never make any friendly emotional connection with either Gamesman or with the woman--will never know them--and by references to T. S. Eliot, a poet whose early work is all about alienation and sexual dysfunction.  (Papa Joe Block may be a scrub in the sack, but at least he's well-read!)

T. S. Eliot, sexual dysfunction and alienation are three of my favorite things to read about, so Malzberg had me hooked from the start this time.  After that first attention-grabbing and laugh-inducing chapter we learn a little more about the crazy future world of the 23rd century in which the story is set, its oppressive government and the Game that is at this tale's center.  It seems that life is so unhappy in a high-tech world in which the government controls everything that fifty percent of people commit suicide before the age of twenty-five!  Once you have passed your twenty-fifth birthday you are forbidden to commit suicide, and those who despair, instead of killing themselves, throw themselves into the very risky Game.   

There is a very amusing chapter in which we see Papa Joe Block's interview with the local Games Master, the bitter and passive-aggressive man who decides who will be permitted to participate in the Game.  This sad sack tells Papa Joe right out that the Game is a scam, that nobody has ever won, that nobody can win, that the Game is just a "safety valve" that provides people an illusion of hope--"Without belief in them as a means out of the trap of their lives, social tensions and psychic pressures in the populace would build to a point where the entire system would implode."  Despite being told this, Papa Joe remains confident that he will be the first player to win the Game.

The individual tests that make up the Game take many forms--in fact, the Players themselves have a large share in the responsibility of what their own Game will be like.  Papa Joe Block decided that his own Level 1 objective would be to successfully ejaculate inside a woman; he is given ten tries to accomplish this feat, a feat which billions of men have accomplished over the course of human history but which is a challenge for our poor narrator.  This reminded me of Malzberg's The Day of the Burning, in which a guy who is probably hallucinating is told by an alien that he is on a quest to save the world and that the form of this quest is to simply do his government welfare office job correctly for once.

One of the clever and surprising things about the Game is that the Gamesmen who referee and judge the Players are not disinterested professionals but Players themselves!  (It is implied that the Game is financed on a shoestring.)  Papa Joe Block serves as Gamesman to a couple competing in the Game as a team, a bold and worn woman and her weak and wan male partner, and we watch as, from behind the anonymizing mask worn by all Gamesmen, Block judges their performance answering a battery of trivia questions (e. g., "When was John F. Kennedy assassinated?") Block assesses their answers quite arbitrarily, cluing us readers in to the possibility that the Game is somehow bogus, as perhaps is Papa Joe's own professed commitment to the Game's traditions and rules.

Papa Joe receives a visitor to his tiny flat on the 57th floor of a skyscraper--it is his Gamesman!  Gamesman removes his mask, a flouting of the Game rules, and tells our narrator that they should work together to undermine the Game because it is rigged so as to be unwinnable.  Papa Joe refuses, but he has been corrupted, his faith in the Game shaken, and he starts approaching other Players, telling them what he has learned in hopes that they will resolve his dilemma for him, help him decidedwhether or not his dedication to the Game has been a terrible mistake.  But our hero achieves no satisfaction--there is no way out of his Catch-22, no-win situation.  Papa Joe desperately wants to advance in the Game, but he also wants to maintain his faith in the Game's fairness, and there is no way he can do both: on his eighth attempt to consummate the conventional sex act, Gamesman judges Papa Joe to have succeeded, even though our narrator has ejaculated on the woman's stomach as usual.

After advancing to Level 2 (however illegitimately), Papa Joe continues to overcome Game challenges (challenges which Malzberg does not bother to describe) until he approaches the allegedly impossible final test.  This unconventional challenge puts Papa Joe once again in a dilemma--he is given the job not merely of one of many Gamesmen, but of Games Master for his region, and he must decide if he should pass that couple he has been Gamesman to, whom he is well aware should be rejected--will Papa Joe defend the integrity of the Game (even though he has already benefited from breaking the Game's rules) or help out a fellow Player?  Which course will the true Masters of the Game judge to be the correct one?  Have the Masters posed him a challenge in which either decision he could make will be judged wrong, making the Game as unwinnable as he has been told?

In the final scenes of the novel the themes of sexual dysfunction and alienation from the first chapter are replayed--Papa Joe and the nameless woman Player have sex after dismissing her male partner, and our hero succeeds in ejaculating inside her--success!  But Block fails utterly to make any human connection with her--as had Gamesman before her, she quixotically seeks to form an alliance with him to try to stop the horrible Game and change society for the better, but he rejects her entreaties and does nothing to help her when the real Games Master returns and physically drags her off to be thrown in the Pit where all losers (i.e., all Players) end up--we must expect that Papa Joe Block himself will soon join her in oblivion.

"You'll be thrown into the Pit and it will be as if you never existed, as if none of this ever happened."

Malzberg takes as his subject in The Gamesman competitive sport, and we might see the novel as a sort of satire of the obsession of so many people with sports, which it is common for lefties to categorize as an "opiate of the masses" that keeps the people from rising up in revolution.  (George Orwell makes this point in numerous places, including in 1984 and The Road to Wigan Pier, and in both he links sports fandom to gambling; note that Malzberg compares the Game to a lottery.)  You and I know people whose mood is determined by how well "their team" is doing in some contest or other, people who know all kinds of sports statistics and history, and Papa Joe is like one of those people--he repeatedly tells us that his whole life, his entire psychological being, has been centered on the Game:

If he questions the assumptions of the Game wholly then he is denying his life, everything toward which his life has been focused. 

(As you may know, the winds of fate cast me ashore in the Baltimore-D.C. area, and so recently I had to endure the general excitement over the local team wining a big contest.  I didn't tell this to anybody, because I have no balls, but I thought it regrettable that the Washington team should win the world championship, because "the Beltway" is already inhabited by arrogant people who think they should run the lives of everybody else in the country, and I feared the victory of their team would only feed their inflated egos.)

Anyway, Malzberg here in The Gamesman suggests that sports obsession is a reflection of how psychologically difficult life is in modern industrial society; the Game is the surface topic of his book, but the Game is only a symptom of his real basic concern, that life in a technologically advanced society is meaningless.  (In his 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," which I think is valuable for helping us understand both Campbell and Malzberg, Malzberg relates that he told the editor of Astounding in 1969 that "it's not machinery, it's people, people being consumed at the heart of these machines, onrushing technology, the loss of individuality, the loss of control, these are the issues that are going to matter in science fiction for the next fifty years.")

Two thirds of the way into The Gamesman, Malzberg directly addresses the failure of technology to improve connections between people when he introduces the idea of a matter transmitter, another of the government's devices to distract the populace from the pointlessness of their lives.  The matter transmitter allows people to travel all over the world for a nominal fee, and Malzberg says:

Some to Tripoli, others to the Plains area, several to the Arabic Republic cluster in small groups whispering confidences of the voyage, but the majority are singles going to destinations apart from the others and the only thing which binds them together, it would seem, is their desperate need to get away from one another.  This would not build community.

Illustrating this, when Papa Joe, in the crowd of people waiting to be transmitted, tries to make friends with someone, his inept effort results in the crowd and an authority figure turning on him in anger.  I thought maybe this matter transmitter business was a satire of TV, a technological marvel that has been heralded as bringing the world together as a "global village" by exposing people to far off cultures, but also denounced as destroying real community by giving everybody an incentive to never leave the house to meet real people in the flesh.  

If you've spent time among Democrats and other pinkos, as I have, you may be familiar with the concept of "false consciousness," the idea that the common people don't know their own interests and need the guidance of the "vanguard" to convince them to join the revolution or of left-wing journalists and college professors to convince them to vote for the correct candidates.  The Gamesman may be a sort of dramatization or satire of this concept, as throughout the novel we see Papa Joe vacillate between holding on to his childlike faith in the Game's fairness despite the claims presented by his betters that the Game is a scam and should be undermined from within, and embracing this "truth" and trying to convince others (with limited success) of this terrible reality.

The Gamesman is also a sort of spoof or commentary on books and writing.  In conventional fiction about a game or sport or other competition (fighting a war or managing a business, say) the game or conflict would be used as a metaphor for life.  Here in The Gamesman, Malzberg/Papa Joe Block insists, repeatedly, that the Game is not a metaphor.  Malzberg also makes a joke about his own inability as a writer to describe memorable characters (he similarly incorporated criticisms of his own style into the narrative of The Day of the Burning.)

Is The Gamesman any good--can I recommend it to people?  Well, it is not the adventure story of a guy fighting in an arena or racing through a death maze or something ("He was quick enough to survive") or a vivid depiction of future society ("A staggering vision of Earth in the not-so-distant future") the text on the book's cover implies it is.  Quite a few chapters are good--the sex scenes and the first interview with the Games Master are funny, and the matter transmitter business is good--but a number of scenes feel repetitive; there are multiple interviews with the Games Master (including a dream sequence) and the renegade Gamesman and some of these don't feel strictly necessary or as individually well-crafted as others.  The Gamesman might have been more successful as a work of art if it was shorter, though probably Malzberg needed to reach a certain word count to sell it as a novel.  Malzberg theoretically might have padded the thing with discussions of how life is lived in the 23rd century, government and economy stuff, or more examples of Game tests, but Malzberg does very little to describe the setting or to present memorable images--it is not Malzberg's practice to do the "world building" that so many SF readers look for, or to pen thrilling action scenes.  As a Malzberg fan, I of course enjoyed The Gamesman, but God knows if others will.

Maybe The Gamesman is for Malzberg fans only...and perhaps Philip K. Dick fans.  I got a lot of mileage out of comparing the work of Michael Moorcock to The Garbage World in my blog post about that novel by Charles Platt, who dedicated The Garbage World to Moorcock, and maybe if I was familiar with Dick's oeuvre I could have done a similar thing here, but Dick resides in one of the many lacunae in my reading.

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Having drafted my own blog post on The Gamesman, now comes the time here at MPorcius Fiction Log when we reread Joachim Boaz's blog post on it and see to what extent he and I agree or disagree about the topic at hand.  But I am kind of at a loss, because I can't disagree with anything substantive Joachim said in his review.  If there is disagreement, I think it is that Joachim finds The Gamesman to be above average Malzberg, and I find it to be just average Malzberg.  My readings of Underlay, Everything Happened to Susan, Herovit's World, Screen, and The Horizontal Woman are leading me to believe that Malzberg's best work is his least science-fictiony, his stories about people in New York struggling with sexual frustration, unfulfilling government jobs and dismal writing careers.