Review - 'Double Down' - Frederick and Steven Barthelme - gambling

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The review of Double Down - reflections on gambling and loss follows beneath the dotted line.

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From the moment you look at the cover, Double Down begins to get under your skin.

If its two middle-aged men losing thousands at the casino were more stereotypical gambling losers - rootless drifters who had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks and the law - Frederick and Steven Barthelme's book would have been a largely ineffectual rendering of a cliche.

But the Barthelmes are two university academics, who grew into good jobs on the back of a loving upbringing by well-adjusted parents.

There are no excuses built into this story. No abuse, no alcoholism, no bad example from a gambling parent. A proud mother and her two young sons stare out from the cover - content, innocent middle America. That's probably lemonade Mom has in her glass.

This is a story from the right side of the tracks; the side where most of us live. That's what makes this account of two brothers ruined by slots and blackjack so terrifyingly compelling.

"We are brothers, college professors and writers," the book begins, "and for a period starting in 1995 we often played blackjack all night long at the casinos in Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi. At first we were playing on paychecks, our tiny savings accounts, credit card advances, and we lost everything we could get our hands on. Then, in 1995 and 1996, our parents died, one after the other in quick succession and after that, we gambled more, and harder. We lost everything they left us and then some. Still we went on playing..."

And you watch them, through this book, horrified to see all the crash barriers that you imagine stand between addiction and people like this, swept aside. They don't stagger from a convenient Vegas bar or brothel next door to squander their inheritance, they drive down from Hattiesburg and the University of Southern Mississippi, a trip of over 50 miles. Long enough, you'd think, to make them wonder what they were doing with their lives. Especially on the way home.

Sandwiched between increasingly chilling tales of their road to oblivion behind the casino door, is the book's centrepiece of family album photos - the brothers as children taking to their architect father, Christmas mornings in the prototype 'designer house' in which they grew up in Texas, and their mother's handsome, sincere face. To imagine the financial legacy of all this winding up in casino coffers makes your heart ache for answers.

And in fairness to them, the Bartheleme brothers are indefatigable in proffering explanations without ever getting them confused with excuses. There is no descent into self-pity: they write as onlookers trying to analyse a distant relative, sparsely yet penetratingly and if they don't quite pin down a single, neat culprit behind their descent into madness, there is no shortage of suspects.

In casinos, they find the glamour so lacking in the university life. They speculate that their gambling may have been a form of penance for wrongs buried in their subconscious, or alternatively a celebration of their togetherness as brothers. The danger and fickleness of the casino make them savour afresh the solidity of their lives away from it.

Yet never do they throw a tarpaulin of romanticism over the essential ugliness of what they are doing on their way into a hole that will eventually surpass a quarter of a million dollars and lead them into a humiliating encounter with the law, on charges of cheating.

Every predictable footprint on this well-worn road to hell is at some point filled by a Barthelme shoe. Their intial intention to master the maths of blackjack gets washed away by gambling's 'rush' and they jettison their last lifebelt when they reject the idea of card-counting.

"Playing this way isn't much fun. It's work," they write. "Hard, dull, fatiguing work. To go whistling down to the coast in the middle of the night in order to work all night at the blackjack table didn't set the nerve endings atingle."

Eventually, they start to rationalise losing, keep no-one's counsel but their own and come out with lines like this:

"...play the game, any game, for significant stakes and you'll know. It's not whether you win or lose, it's that you play."

To anyone who enjoys his gambling precisely because it goes hand-in-hand with careful financial restraint, this is an insulting generalisation, yet as much as you might wish you could slap the Barthelme boys, you never lose interest in them. They acknowledge their addiction but also the fact they were more interested in enjoying it than seeking a way out.

Double Down is a fascinating and lucid look into the mind of a compulsive gambler. If you're a parent of two young boys as I am, it is also sad and frightening in equal measure.

And if you're a gambler who can walk away and finds scrupulous money management fundamental to what you do, it is the perfect book for making sure you never take those sterling qualities for granted.