Stefan Fatsis: Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, And Obsession In The World Of Competitive Scrabble

Of the dozen or so perennially enduring board games, Scrabble exists in a class by itself. Monopoly and Clue may sell just as well, but only Scrabble has inspired a virtual subculture of competitive players, those for whom the game goes well beyond rainy-day recreation. For Word Freak, Wall Street Journal sportswriter Stefan Fatsis plunged headlong into the world of competitive Scrabble. Already a practiced fan of the game, Fatsis was initially surprised when one expert dismissed him as a "good living-room player," but that shock eroded as he learned more about his subject. Just as chess changed when players began thinking about formalized strategies, Scrabble changed in the '70s, when the advent of word lists moved the focus of the game away from players' vocabularies. Experts began studying complete lists of all acceptable letter combinations, with top players even attempting to memorize the eight- and nine-letter words that can only be formed in conjunction with words already on the board. Naturally, the pastime attracted some eccentric characters. By Fatsis' account, it seems to have attracted almost exclusively eccentric characters, even if they don't have much in common beyond their love of the tiles. To stay on top of his game, former national champion Joe Edley uses a variety of secondhand Eastern practices inherited from the New Age California in which he came of age. His world is far removed from that of stand-up comic Matt Graham, who, strung out on smart pills and cheap booze, continually threatens to drop out of the narrative. Between character studies and descriptions of Scrabble competition folkways—whining about tile selection is considered the height of bad form—Fatsis delivers a detailed history of the game itself, reaching from its Victorian parlor-game predecessors to the current, uneasy relationship between possessive players and occasionally clueless corporate owners. As the book progresses, its focus shifts. A wry, insightful writer, Fatsis never surrenders to the condescension promised by the title, even when finding humor in his subjects' behavior. Eventually, the true object of the title's insult becomes apparent, as Fatsis becomes one of his own subjects, obsessed with attaining the elusive "expert" label that would place him in the top rank of competitive Scrabble players. His observations never objectively explain the appeal of the game at such a rarified level, possibly because no such explanation exists. Like the journal of an addiction that can only suggest the rush of a user's high, Fatsis' account can only tell how he, and others like him, came to his current state. That account should permanently change the way Word Freak's readers look at Scrabble, if not at words themselves.