The brothers already felt restless as middle-aged academics, but their heavy gambling began after their beloved mother died. It got worse after the death of their less-beloved father. He’d left them each about $150,000, and in three months most of it was gone, “as if the loss and guilt were too much to bear and the money was also too much to bear.” Their account hardly ends on a redemptive note. “With no children, no future, just a permanent present, we believed… the family was still abiding… But we were wrong. In the meantime… we never had to think about anything but the cards, and in the cards everything else disappeared.” But their redemption is the book itself, in which shell shock is transfigured by literary grace.
