The Art of Losing: A Novel [Hardcover]

Keith Dixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 20, 2007

Michael Jacobs, a talented but obscure New York City filmmaker, has just watched his third film flop at the box office.  With few options available, Jacobs is tempted by the prospect of easy cash when Sebby Laslo, his producer, makes a one-time offer.  With the help of a corrupt jockey, Laslo plans to fix a horse race, but his gambling debts have left him untouchable and he needs someone he can trust to be the public face of the operation.  Though Laslo is known for taking risks, Jacobs, hoping to repay an old favor to his friend, agrees to help.
 
Jacobs soon meets two Atlantic City bookmakers: Nikos Popolosikc, a quietly menacing restaurateur known for breaking hands; and Lad Keegan, a soft-spoken bar owner whose superstitions are bad for his clients' health. When Laslo's plan fails, Jacobs, heavily in debt, is ensnared by a violent underworld he neither knows nor understands. In the inevitable reckoning, Jacobs and Laslo become hunted men--and only one of them will escape.
 
Keith Dixon's second novel is a morality tale of stunning resonance and breathtaking symmetry.  Hard-boiled yet deeply contemplative, allegorical yet starkly realistic, The Art of Losing divines the corrosive nature of greed, the terrible power of recklessness, and the consequences that erupt when those forces meet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Michael Jacobs is an independent filmmaker in New York City whose just-released third film flopped like the first two. With no money and no prospects, he agrees to help fair-weather friend Sebby Laslo fix horse races. Unsurprisingly, the plan fails in spectacular fashion, and Michael, Sebby and Thierry, the jockey they're in cahoots with, end up on the wrong side of some very bad dudes. Loans from Michael's father and Beck Trier, a successful indie director Michael wishes was his girlfriend, aren't enough to pay off mounting debts, and when the surefire score the trio cooks up to balance the books backfires, bookies and bagmen take off the kid gloves. Dixon, an editor at the New York Times, writes with convincing detail and lays on thick the bookmaking and horse-racing argot ("a clear field of three for win, place, and show, with Thierry on the sure-bet and Vato on the placer"), though Michael's actions at the climax are more a function of plot than character. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

New York City filmmaker Mike Jacobs is so tired of being broke that it seems like a good idea when his friend and producer, Sebby Laslo, suggests they strike it rich by fixing a horse race. Sebby enlists two jockeys to do the heavy lifting, but Mike will have to place the bets with_a string of shady_bookmakers because Sebby has run out of credit. First, he needs to establish his credentials by losing a few bets--that's the easy part. The hard part comes when the horses who are supposed to win the fixed race collide and fall en route to the big payoff. One jockey is left paralyzed, the other is overcome by a need to confess, and Mike is left holding the bag for thousands in debts that he has no way of repaying. Just to survive, he'll need to do things he wouldn't have thought himself capable of doing, but he does them all the same. It is a descent into darkness that can only end in calamity, but the reader, swept up in the narrative momentum, can no more look away than Mike can avoid damnation, if not death. Dixon has written a cautionary tale that is not easy to enjoy but even harder to forget. Dennis Dodge
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 243 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1St Edition edition (February 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312358687
• ISBN-13: 978-0312358686
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,596,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Keith Dixon's first novel, "Ghostfires," was named one of the five best first novels of 2004 by Poets & Writers Magazine. His second novel, "The Art of Losing," was named 'Editor's Choice' by The Philadelphia Inquirer, and received starred reviews in both Kirkus and Booklist.

In June 2011, Crown will publish "Cooking for Gracie," a memoir and cookbook based on food writing first published in The New York Times.

Keith was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1971 but was raised in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. He attended Hobart College in Geneva, New York. He is an editor for The New York Times News Technology department, and lives in New York with his wife, Jessica, and their daughters Grace and Margot.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, Multileveled, and Highly Entertaining!, February 28, 2007

By 

E. Shepard (Burlington, Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Losing: A Novel (Hardcover)

I started reading this book expecting a fun and sharply written crime-caper. After all, the advertised plot revolves around a documentary filmmaker (Mike Jacobs) based in NYC (which is beautifully rendered), who seeks fast money by placing bets on what appear to be fixed horse races. This plan, of course, is quickly complicated.

What I didn't expect, and greatly enjoyed, were the deeper levels of the story - themes of memory, conscience, and redemption. Yet while the book is thought-provoking, Dixon avoids cliches, and he avoids bogging down the story with exposition. The tale cracks along. "The Art of Losing" would make an excellent movie - especially if it was directed in such a way that the story retained it's subtlety.

Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The art of filming isn't hard to master..., May 29, 2007

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Losing: A Novel (Hardcover)

Mike Jacobs gets a lot of advice in THE ART OF LOSING, and most of it is good. Some of it is from his would-be girlfriend, a Danish filmmaker who knits scarves and hats to remind her distant relatives that it's cold outside. Some of it is from his wealthy parents who caution him about the lure of money. And some of it is from tough guys who work for bookies and have no compunction about slamming Mike's hand in a door should he not be able to pay off his bets. It's all good advice, but he doesn't listen to very much of it.

Mike makes films, a process that is a gamble all its own. ("Films," you understand. Not "movies," never "movies.") The failure of his third film is the catalyst for the tale, and is instructive in and of itself. It is a documentary called The Daisy Chain (Mike never explains the significance of the title) that takes place in Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital in Manhattan. Mike spends a year of his life and every scrap of money that he can get his hands on to make the film --- cutting corners by having the psychiatric patients who are the subject of the documentary handle the camera work, for example.

The Daisy Chain premieres in New York, but only a few people show up. Certainly not enough to make the production company any profit, certainly not enough to get the film to a wider audience in arthouse theaters across the country, certainly not enough to sell the film to the cable networks, and certainly not enough to compensate Mike for the year he took out of his life to make the film.

So, you're an impoverished New York filmmaker, in between films, and you need money fast --- not just to make your next film but to make your next meal; not just to stave off the "starving artist" cliché but starvation itself. What can you do? What should you do?

What Mike Jacobs does is play the ponies. The novel opens up at Aqueduct, where Mike and his producer Sebby Laslo have a line on a sure thing, a 50-to-1 shot that will pay off huge if it can just manage to overcome its little problem of an injured tendon. The horse finishes last, consistent with Mike's own track record. But Sebby knows a jockey, and the jockey knows horses, so there might be a way after all to turn the tables on the odds and walk away with enough money for Mike to lift himself out of poverty without compromising his artistic integrity or begging his parents.

This requires Mike to ignore a lot of the advice he receives --- even though it's well-meaning, correct and meant to save his life. Author Keith Dixon sets up the first half of the book with any number of escape routes, ways that Mike can save himself by pulling out of his self-destructive spiral. And then, one by one, Dixon closes the routes, locks off the tunnels and artfully seals Mike's fate gradually.

THE ART OF LOSING benefits from more than the deft plotting and its cynical, paranoid tone. Dixon gives Mike a cinematic eye for details, describing even the most minute experiences --- visiting the eye doctor, getting a shaving cut --- in a vivid, forceful way. Dixon's dark take on art, the track and the lengths to which people will go for money is stark and engrossing --- and it just might help you listen to some of the advice you get everyday.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds,

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars this is an odd little book, May 12, 2007

By 

Emer Foley "Emer Foley" (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Art of Losing: A Novel (Hardcover)

not quite what i expected. but the writing is solid and the author has talent. i found some of the situations and the way people acted hugely implausible but still enjoyed the book. it's a noir. very dark and thank God the author didn't opt for a cute and happy ending. it's a nice distance from the "new" kind of crime novel that has to be cute and funny. If you like this you'd like Con Ed another very good crime book that is very much along the same vein as this one. it's good to see this kind of book getting some success. this writer had talent and the book just breezes along. can't wait to see what this author comes up with next.