The Gambler (1866)

Whenever I read, I hunger for goodness.  If I start to suspect that the book doesn’t have any, I lose interest.

But here’s the thing—goodness is difficult to write about.  Why?  It might be in the nature of how I taste goodness.  Take the goodness of pizza.  My experience of this goodness is more intense if I’m hungry.  This is even true if I’m not physically hungry but am stress-eating because stress is its own sort of hunger.  

The same holds true when reading.  I can’t taste goodness in a story until I hunger for it.  That’s why the most powerful experiences of goodness in a novel normally occur toward the end.  The work of the novel is to carve out a space for goodness to fill.  

If in chapter one, Dostoevsky were to say “Here’s my good character, isn’t she great?”  My response would probably be: “Get your prickly beard off my neck!  If I’m gonna make a big decision like that, I need some space, man!”

But (thankfully) Dostoevsky doesn’t do this in The Gambler.  The most powerful glimmer of goodness is the vulnerable love within Polina.  Instead of trotting this out when I first meet her, Dostoevsky introduces her to me through the eyes of Alexei, who thinks she’s a cold-hearted tyrant.  And so when she shows up in his hotel room, in pain, used and abandoned by her lover, des Greux, I get a sense of her preciousness not in spite of but because of how little goodness I’ve seen so far.  The selfishness, vanity, and greed with which I’d been bombarded for the last thirteen chapters made me hunger for it.

I feel similarly when Granny shows up.  Before then, the world of Roulettenberg is characterized by posturing, facade, deceit.  Half the characters are under false names with false titles and false family members.  Then in comes Granny, “carried in an armchair . . . brisk, perky, self-satisfied, straight-backed, shouting loudly and commandingly, scolding everybody.”  She’s extraordinarily blunt.  If I’d met her at the beginning, she would’ve registered a pretty small number on my goodness meter.  But since she glides in just as the novel sinks me neck-deep into a swamp of deception, her frankness refreshes. Dostoevsky has primed me to see her goodness.

That said, this is a challenging way to write because it means for the early and middle parts of the novel, the characters will often seem callously drawn, and cynicism will ooze out of the page.  This puts stress on the reader.  No more stress than barraging the reader with earnestness, but still, when trying to carve out space for goodness, I can easily go too far and dig such a black hole that the reader must, simply to cope, not give the book full attention.

Dostoevsky does not avoid plunging into the gloom, yet he manages to bring with him enough light for me to face my shadow without being swallowed by it.  

He does this by writing with discretion.  He doesn’t give details when details could abuse me.  My shadow-side is like a boy who bites his friend.  My dad could teach me the pain of violence by biting me and saying, “See how you like it!”  But Dad would do better to help me see myself and see the path toward goodness.  Dostoevsky is this sort of dad to the reader.  He exposes the ugliness of violence without violating.

He is also writing from a personal belief in goodness.  If while reading a book, I get the sense that the novelist is a despairing cynic with no sense of the sacredness of the soul, I do not feel safe exploring hell with this guide.  But I often find myself surprised by the depths of the abyss I’m willing to scope out with Dostoevsky, who never sugarcoats, but who has a sense of not being overcome.